


Insane

by Blaumeise



Series: Insane [1]
Category: Guns N' Roses
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drug Abuse, M/M, Medical Torture, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Mildly Dubious Consent, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:20:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 50,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25549618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blaumeise/pseuds/Blaumeise
Summary: Alternate Universe: Slash has miscalculated a dose. Sure, three overdoses in two months may seem excessive, but that doesn't mean he is suicidal. So why does he suddenly find himself locked into a mental institution with a bunch of lunatics? Axl clearly belongs here, no question, but is Duff really psychic? And did Izzy really kill a whole family with a chainsaw?Determined to be released as fast as possible, Slash finds himself soon in the middle of more than just madness and insanity.
Relationships: Duff McKagan/Izzy Stradlin
Series: Insane [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1879291
Comments: 71
Kudos: 52





	1. Social Behaviour

**Author's Note:**

> This story is not meant to be an accurate depiction of ... well, anything. Definitely not of mental diseases or the psychiatric system in general. It was just written for fun and I took liberties left and right to fit my narrative.

Slash read through the document in his lap with growing confusion.

“What …,” He looked up at the attorney, one Mr P. Diallo, who had come into the hospital room this morning and tried to explain it to him. Unfortunately, none of his words made any sense at all. 

“I’m twenty-three. Last time I checked that means I don’t need a legal guardian.”

Waking up after three days of coma and then, on the same day, being confronted with legal bullshit was asked a bit much. His head hurt, he was trembling, he was sweating, he urgently needed a fix. Instead he was dealing with this guy in a suit, whom he had never seen in all of his life, and who had nothing better to do than using complicated words in long-winded sentences. 

In addition, his hands were tied to the bed, which might have something to do with his attempt to just up and leave, and maybe also that he hadn’t exactly been nice to the nurse who had tried to stop him, but that didn’t help clearing his head either. In fact, it was annoying and made things worse. 

“This is not a permanent solution,” Diallo said. “You were temporarily declared unfit to make decisions for yourself. After the third suicide attempt …”

“Woah, stop there!” Slash was sitting up a bit straighter in his hospital bed. “That wasn’t a suicide attempt. I just miscalculated a dose.”

Yes, he was the first to agree that he had been really bad at calculating during the last months, but that just came from being low on money and having to resort to the cheapest shit he could get from the shittiest dealer in town. Dope quality was up and down and all over the place all the time, and it was no miracle that he had had a few misses lately. Didn’t mean he was trying to end his life. 

“Your family is understandably worried,” Diallo went on as if Slash hadn’t said anything, “and your mother has mandated me to take care of your case.”

Slash looked at the document again and slowly, very slowly, it started to dawn on him what had happened.

“Does this mean what I think this means?” he asked. They were not only imprisoning him. This was worse. All he had done was miscalculate a dose and they were taking away all his rights. 

“We have found a suitable institution for the time being,” Diallo went on. “Transport will be organized as soon as you have recovered from withdrawal.”

“No!” Slash exclaimed. “You can’t just do that. And … if my Mom started this shit, why isn’t she here?”

“Believe me, Mr Hudson, I can. I discussed the course of action with your mother and, given your current state of denial regarding the seriousness of your situation, we have mutually agreed that it is better if I handle your case on my own. One overdose might indeed be an accident. Three in just two months leave a bad taste.”

He closed his briefcase with a snap and stood up. 

“We will talk in a couple of months, once you have settled at St. John’s. Good bye, Mr Hundson.”

Slash stared after him. Months? They were going to send him to a nuthose for months? Just because he had miscalculated a dose? 

Oh well, it wasn’t his first stint at rehab. His debut had been at fifteen. He had escaped within a week and spent a couple of months on the streets before returning home. Then his Mom had sent him again at seventeen, in an attempt to clean him up before he turned eighteen and was able to make his own decisions. Again, he had ditched the place fast enough and skipped going home for the rest of his minority. This time wouldn’t be any different. A week at best and he would be gone. 

+++

A week later Slash got out of the taxi on legs that weren’t quite as wobbly anymore as they had been during the withdrawal period. He still felt weaker than he liked, but that might just as well be a result of looking at the building in front of him. “St. John’s Institution for the Mentally Impaired” was written on a sign next to the entrance and while the closed ward of the hospital had been bad enough, this was different. 

A large complex of several brick buildings from the turn of the century, surrounded by a prison-like wall, complete with barbed wire on top loomed up in front of him. All windows were barred and a security guard stood next to the entry. Escaping was shifting fast out of the range of things that were possible. 

Slash swallowed, his hands closing desperately around the handle of his bag. It would be easier if he at least knew for how long he would have to stay here, but ‘we will see how it goes’ had been the only timeframe he had been given.

“Come on, now.” The orderly who had accompanied him said. “You’re not the only special snowflake I have to deliver today.”

The admission procedure took ages. He was weighed, measured, examined and relieved of both blood and urine; the latter under the watchful eye of the nurse who was in charge of collecting his different body fluids. Then he was handed over to another orderly, a huge guy whose shaved head shone black under the glaring headlight, and who introduced himself as ‘Lucas’. Slash feel like a dwarf in comparison. 

“How was the trip?” Lucas asked while they walked through a labyrinth of corridors. They passed from one building through a connection to the next, then up one staircase, down another and ended in yet another building, at the back of the whole complex. Their steps were loud in the empty corridors and the walls showed signs of countless bags being dragged along by countless people who had been as down on their luck as Slash was now. 

“OK.” What was he supposed to say? He hadn’t exactly been flown in from out of state, just travelled up from L.A. It hadn’t even taken an hour. 

“It’s all a bit much at the beginning,” Lucas went on sounding friendly enough. Slash didn’t care. He was not here to make friends, he was here to get out again as fast as possible. “We’ll get you settled now, you’ll meet some of the guys, and you’ll see, tomorrow things will brighten up.”

‘As if,’ Slash thought and wished for a fix or a drink or at least a cigarette. He would get none of those, of course, not even the cigarette, because he was not supposed to exchange one addiction for another. Who talked about exchanging? He should have explained to them that he was very well able to maintain several different addictions all at the same time. 

They reached their destination. The building he would be staying in was at the very end of the complex. Slash wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. Normally it would make escaping easier, but just looking at the outer wall nipped all his hopes right in the bud. Automatically he checked for trees that stood too close, anything that would facilitate climbing up, but whoever had designed the garden knew what he was doing.

When yet another door closed behind them with a thud that clearly indicated it would not open again anytime soon, Slash was seized by yet another surge of claustrophobia; this time one that refused to be just shaken off. There was a long row of doors in front of him, a staircase leading up and another one down. His new home.

This was where he would stay for an unspecified duration of time. It could be months – he wasn’t kidding himself into making it weeks – or years. It was all up to the doctors and whether they considered him still to be a risk for his own safety. 

They took the staircase up. Slash swallowed hard in order to prevent a meltdown there and then, but was torn out of his terrors, when a scream rang through the corridors, echoed from the walls, and died in the vibrations of the steel-railings along the staircases. 

"What was that?" Slash he asked and caught the lapels of his jacket in a futile attempt to protect himself against the shrill, child-like voice. 

It didn’t help. He could still feel it in his bones, the pain, the anguish, the desperation as if it hadn't just been a scream, but the outcry of a tortured soul that cursed its tormentors and damned them to the deepest abyss of hell. 

"Axl." Lucas said with a wry smile. "He's gonna be your roommate."

"My what?" Slash stopped dead in his tracks. 

"No need to worry, he's improved a lot since he's come here."

"He's improved?" Slash yielded to the nudge at his shoulder and followed Lucas along another corridor.

"Oh yes, a lot. That's why Dr Johnson decided to give it a try and give him a roommate. That hasn't been possible so far, but sooner or later he has to learn social behaviour."

"What a pleasure," Slash mumbled. "Why me?"

"I don't make the living-arrangements. You have to ask Dr J. So, there we are. This is your room."

' And Axl's,' Slash finished silently. 

The door stood open, just like all other doors they had passed since coming into this section. Slash entered hesitantly and his attention turned immediately to the skinny redhead who sat cross-legged on the bed next to the window. His face was flushed and puffy, but through a haze of tears he managed to cast them such a hateful look, that Slash almost made a step backwards. 

"Bad day, Axl?" Lucas pointed towards the other bed, but Slash made no move to get any closer. He would have to pass the resident banshee in order to do that and that didn’t seem like a good idea. 

"What's he doing here?" Axl asked when it became apparent that they were there for more than to just pass on their regards.

"Slash is your new roommate," Lucas said. "Doc Johnson explained it to you."

"I don't want a roommate." Axl wiped his running nose with the sleeve of his flannel-shirt. 

"You will have lots of fun together." Lucas was unmoved by both, the tears and the refusal to share his room. 

"I said I don't want a roommate!" Axl yelled. His voice was so shrill it was painful.

"Be in time for therapy, Axl," Lucas said instead of an answer. "I'm not in the mood to search for you again, and you know what Dr J thinks about being late."

Slash felt a blink of panic when Lucas turned towards the door. He wouldn't rule it out that Axl might scratch and bite if he dared taking possession of the unused bed. 

"You two now take some time and get to know each other," Lucas patted Slash's shoulders. "Axl is going to show you around and explain everything to you. He's been here long enough to be an expert on our procedures."

Axl snorted and Lucas winked at him before he left. 

"Hi," Slash said and stuffed his hands into his pockets.

"Hi," Axl mocked him, imitating his tone. "If you think you can just come in here and we'll be best pals or some shit, you're even more stupid than you look."

"I have no need for a best pal, so don't worry." Determined to not let Axl intimidate him, Slash sat down on his bed. It was hard and narrow and creaked with every move.

"What are you here for?" Axl wiped his face with his sleeve. Whatever the reason for his tears, he seemed to have forgotten about it. 

"Huh?" Slash opened his bag and looked through its content. His Mom had packed it a day before he had been released from hospital. Shirts, socks, sweatpants toothpaste, he noticed with a hint of disappointment. Not even a comic or a magazine and of course no belt, no shoe-laces and no sharp objects. 

"Why are you here? Do you bite nails or do you set fire to other people's houses? You're not here without a reason."

"It's a misunderstanding," Slash said. "I had an accident, that's all."

"An accident, huh?"

"Yeah, an accident." Fuck, it wasn't Axl's business. "Why are you here?" he asked back. Not that he needed to ask. It was obvious that Axl fitted perfectly into a place like St. John's Institution for the Mentally Impaired. 

Axl sneered. "You'd only get nightmares if I told you." 

"If you say so." Slash pushed the bag off the bed and wondered what he was supposed to do next. 

"Tell me about the accident." 

There was more than normal curiosity on Axl's face. His eyes, pale and intense under short, red lashes, had lost all traces of his former despair. Maybe his tears had been those of a bored child and Slash's arrival presented enough of a distraction to cheer him up. 

"I'll find out anyway. There's nothing you can hide around here. So why not take the chance and tell me your version instead of leaving it to the docs to make up everybody's mind about you?"

Slash hesitated. He didn't feel the slightest need to talk to Axl about anything personal, but he had the feeling that the little freak made a habit out of poking his nose into other people's business. 

"I've miscalculated a dose, OK?"

"Dose of what?" Axl unfolded his legs, but didn't seem to be sure about what to do with them next. He put his feet onto the floor, pulled them up again, wrapped his arms around his knees, only to cross his legs again and resume his previous position. 

"Smack, OK? It was an accident."

Axl wrinkled his nose. He pushed a sleeve up to his elbow and raked his nails slowly up and down the naked skin. Slash could make out numerous shallow scratches all over his arm. 

"I don't like junkies," he said. "You're not going to do the withdrawal-shit here, are you? Hallucinating and moaning and screaming and sweating and stinking?"

Slash shook his head. He had been fully cleaned up at the hospital. He had even promised to do some type of therapy afterwards in hope to get out of this shit. So why the fuck had his Mom agreed to send him here? This wasn’t even your run-of-the-mill rehab facility. This was … something else. 

"Why do you want to kill yourself?" Axl cocked his head. He looked like a bad-tempered, little rodent, a rat or a lemming maybe, curious but suspicious; and always ready to bite. "Did Daddy make you play with his dick? Or did Mommy dress you in girls' clothes and tied bows into your hair? I bet that looked cute. You’ve got the right hair for pretty ribbons.”

Slash thought that Axl was one to talk, with his long, red hair. It would even be suitable for pigtails. 

"It was an accident," Slash repeated. "I miscalculated the dose." Gods, how often had he explained this during the last week? 

"So, who said it was a suicide-attempt?" Axl drew his legs up and rested his chin on his knees. "If they thought you were just a junky, you wouldn't be here."

Slash shrugged. He remembered his Mom's eyes when he came to, the mixture of relief and disappointment on her face. She hadn’t even stayed long enough to talk to him, had just waited until he had woken up and had left. 

He remembered the doctor, hearing through the open door how he talked to her, about how lucky he had been and that a fourth time might be fatal. That they had to take actions now and that he knew the perfect place. 

And then, only hours later, Diallo had shown up, and from there on he had been treated with a matter-of-factness that still left him speechless. A parcel that only had to be processed before shipment. Now he had been shipped and delivered and it remained to see what the recipient would do about him. 

"Whatever." Axl stretched his legs and stood up. "Come on, I'll show you the place. So you won't get into trouble for peeing your pants when you can't find the bathroom."

The complex had looked huge from the outside, but somehow it was even bigger from the inside. It was far enough from the next town to not worry any righteous citizens, miles from the next bus stop and located in the middle of open plains that would make it very difficult to find a hiding place should one be even lucky enough to escape. Slash felt his hopes sink more and more the longer he contemplated the situation. 

He followed Axl down the staircase from the bedrooms on the upper floor to the ground-floor. The dining-room faced the garden, but even here the large panorama-windows were blocked with iron bars. Out through the windows Slash could make out again the almost park-like garden with big trees and a sprawling lawn. A group of people was doing maintenance work at some flowerbeds and Slash hoped dearly he wouldn’t be signed up for any type of gardening therapy. The whole area was split into separate sections, each of them parted from each other by high fences. It reminded him of cattle pastures. 

"Breakfast at half past seven, lunch at twelve, tea at four, dinner at seven, lights out at ten," Axl narrated while they walked past the lines of tables and chairs. The furniture was just as rundown as everything else, cheap and practical and submitted to years of hard use. "If you're not in time, bad luck. Ask Steven, he's missing out on half of his meals. As soon as it's feeding time, he hides in the cupboards and afterwards, he whines because he's hungry."

"OK," Slash said and swallowed the rising anxiety. The way Axl talked indicated that he had been here for a long time, and suddenly he wasn't so sure anymore that his own stay was only an interlude between hospital and going home. 

"Over there's the day-room." Axl pointed towards the door at the end of the dining-hall. "Most of the guys will be there this time of the day, so you can meet some of them. Not that there's anybody worth meeting. They're a bunch of morons, no exception, but what do you expect in a place like this."

Axl knew the name, origin and condition of each and every inmate and was happy to point them out while he led Slash through the door and through a short corridor towards the day-room. 

"Over there, that's Mickey Moretti. He's strangled his wife because he thought she was the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. And Bobby Burns, the one over there, who is sorting the scrabble-stones alphabetically, is here because he arranged everything at home according to size, shape and colour. His children all had to be dressed in identical clothes and had to sit on the sofa from the oldest on the right side to the youngest on the left. He really got into trouble when kid number two was suddenly an inch taller than kid number one. Eventually his wife kicked him out and sent him here. He thinks he's going home at Christmas, but I bet she's already banging the postman."

Slash felt dizzy. There were about twenty men in the room; some stared at him, some seemed blissfully ignorant of their surroundings, some played board-games or sifted through dog-eared books. None of them seemed to be here only for a few weeks. They all had the air of people who had arranged themselves with a situation they couldn't change anyway. 

"Who's that?" He had spotted a tall, blond kid who sat a little forlorn at one of the tables and was busy tearing pages out of a magazine and folding them into paper-ships. An impressing fleet had already set sails around him, but he still followed his task with sad resignation.

"Who? Oh, that. That's Duff." Axl sighed. "He's totally nuts, never says so much as one word that would make any sense. But he's cute, ain't he? He used to suck everybody's cock, until Izzy came, and now he only sucks Izzy's." Axl heaved another sigh that spoke of all the unfairness in the world.

"Izzy?"

Axl rolled his eyes. "You'd better stay clear off Izzy. He thinks he's Napoleon. He's wiped out an entire family, father, mother and two children, all neatly cut apart with a chain-saw. Like he was dividing a Thanksgiving-turkey. You don't want to mess with Izzy, OK?"

"OK," Slash said. He wouldn't mess with Izzy. He didn't even want to stay long enough to meet him. 

"Hey, Duff." Axl walked over and knocked against the table so that all the little ships tumbled over each other. "Looks like there was a seaquake, huh?"

"Hi, Axl." Duff rearranged his fleet before he looked up and flashed Slash a smile as if meeting him had just made his day. "Where's your hat?" he asked.

"My hat?" Slash pulled one of the chairs away from the table and sat down. Maybe Duff was nuts, but he didn't seem the type who strangled his wife or wielded a chain-saw when he got angry. It was almost reassuring to watch him fold more paper-ships with long, agile fingers. 

"Yeah, the top-hat. The one you had last time we met. With the little belt around it. I kinda liked it, you know."

Axl gave Slash a meaningful glance and moved his finger in a little circle next to his head before he sat down, too. 

"Dude, you've never met each other." He started to unfold Duff's ships. "Slash has just arrived half an hour ago."

"Really?" Duff turned soft, dark eyes on Slash. "That's strange." He didn't seem too bothered, though, and returned to his ships. "I almost didn't recognize you without the hat, you know."

Axl rolled his eyes. "He doesn't have a hat, you nutbag."

Duff wasn't offended. He took the destroyed ship out of Axl's hands and folded it back into shape. 

"Tell Slash about the devil," Axl picked up another boat. Unfolding ships was easier than refolding them and Duff watched with desperation the downfall of his fleet. "Did he visit you tonight?"

Duff shook his head and concentrated on his ships until Axl caught his hands and forced him to stop.

"Come on, tell him," he whispered. "Nothing interesting ever happens around here. You're the only one who gets a bit of a thrill."

Duff looked at Slash. "You really wanna know?"

Slash almost said 'no' when he saw the poorly concealed fright on Duff's face, but he was only human. His curiosity was bigger than his sympathy, and so he nodded. 

"He visits me at night." With a longing look at his ships Duff tried to pull his hands free, but Axl held them tight. 

"Details, Duff. Who’s visiting you?"

Duff carefully looked around before he turned his big eyes back on Slash. "Satan," he whispered. 

Slash shuddered. Not that he believed in Satan paying visits to St. John's Institution for the Mentally Impaired, but Duff obviously did. 

"His hands are burning, you know." He sighed. 

"Tell him what he does to you."

Duff shook his head and Slash thought he was about to cry.

"He doesn't have to tell." Slash folded one of the destroyed ships back into shape and added it to Duff's fleet. 

"No, tell him," Axl urged. "Tell him how Satan comes all the way to talk to you and only you and how he touches you and ..."

"Does he hassle you again?"

Axl pulled his hands back and all but jumped off the chair. Duff on the other hand cheered up considerably as he smiled at the newcomer.

"Hi, Izzy," he said. 

Izzy didn't look like a chainsaw-murderer. In his imagination Slash had pictured somebody huge and heavily muscled, somebody with a manic grin and a face like crumpled leather who left destruction with every step he made. Therefore, he was rather surprised when he took in the lean, average looking guy who had approached him from behind and now stepped around the table to Duff's chair. There was nothing dramatic about Izzy. Instead he looked tired and moody and not at all happy with Axl’s behaviour. 

"Are they bothering you?" 

Izzy patted Duff's head in a way that was at the same time possessive and affectionate. His expression remained sullen though, as if he was fed up with having to deal with people at all, and wished dearly to relocate somewhere remote and out of the way. Slash could easily picture him in a lonely mountain hut where he skinned and gutted an elk. Probably with a chainsaw. He shuddered. 

"They're just helping me with the boats," Duff said. He leant his head against Izzy's stomach, obviously comforted enough to forget about the devil and his burning hands. 

"Really? How kind of them." Izzy pulled his lips into a barely notable sneer. 

Duff's eyes had closed and his fingers had stopped their mindless paper-folding. Izzy stroked his hair as if he was a pet.

"Slash is new here, you know. He's just arrived." Duff blinked. He might be afraid of the devil, but receiving caresses from a chainsaw-murderer left him completely undisturbed. "He's lost his top-hat. The one with the little belt, you know."

Slash shook his head and shrugged when Izzy cast him a questioning look. 

"Were you dreaming, Duff?" Izzy kept tousling blond hair as if he had come over to just do that and nothing else. 

Duff frowned. "I don't think so. Last time we met he still had the top-hat, but now it's gone." He looked at Slash. "Want me to help you look for it?" 

"No thank you." Slash had repaired the last one of the destroyed ships. 

They were interrupted a second time when Lucas appeared and dropped a heavy hand onto Axl's shoulder. 

"What did I tell you about being in time?" he asked.

Axl groaned. "Look, I really don't think it makes any sense to go through any more of these…"

"Axl," Lucas said in a voice that tolerated no contradiction. "Get up." His eyes wandered over to the proud paper-fleet. "Jesus, Duff, what did I tell you about ripping pages out of the magazines? Take the old newspapers if you have to play with paper."

"But this is prettier," Duff mumbled. "I like the colours."

Izzy picked up the magazine Duff had raided for his craft-project and looked at the title. 

"120 trendy summer hair-styles," he read. "Issued in June 1972. Really, I don't think this is a big loss."

"Just because he's Duff doesn't mean rules don't apply to him." Lucas nudged Axl again. "Get up, I said."

Axl rolled his eyes, but obeyed. Slash got the feeling that this was rather a routinely done struggle than a real argument about whether he would or wouldn’t attend his therapy. 

"Bye, Axl." Izzy smirked. "Have fun."

Duff waved before he arranged his ships in a line.

"I don't want them to sink." He sighed and eyed his fleet full of sorrow. 

"Then they won't," Slash said, but Duff shook his head.

"There'll be a seaquake. They'll all sink." He pushed one boat after the other over and much to Slash's dismay, he started to cry. 

"Axl was only joking," he said. "He didn't mean it." Suddenly he felt bad for pushing Duff into talking about the devil. 

Duff didn't make a sound. The tears were just running down his cheeks while he unfolded his ships and smoothed out the pages. When he was done, he just sat there and stared at the little stack of paper as if paying respect to the victims of an actual disaster. 

"Lord, our Father in heaven, Lord, the Son, and Saviour of the world, Lord, the Holy Spirit, have mercy on us at the moment of death, and on the last day, save us, merciful and gracious Lord." Duff raised his hands and eyes towards the ceiling as if he expected God to appear and take the paper-sheets up into his realm. 

"Duff," Izzy said softly and ran his hand through his hair once more. "Duff, look at me. You're dreaming."

He nudged his arm a few times until Duff cast him a puzzled look. "I am? Are you sure?"

"Yes."

Duff stroked the paper-stack. He had calmed down, but still seemed a little troubled. "I think I'll go and look for Slash's top-hat then. Are you sad that it's gone?" 

Slash shook his head and Duff smiled.

"Don't be," he said. "I'll find it for you. I have an idea where it might be, you know." He stood up and the nautical disaster seemed forgotten. "I'll be back in a minute. Don't go away, OK?"

"I'll wait here," Slash said and watched while Duff left the room.

"Close your mouth," Izzy said and chuckled. 

"What's wrong with him?" Slash asked, but noticed immediately that he had made a mistake. 

Izzy frowned. "What's wrong with you?"

It was a valid question and Slash wondered if Izzy wanted to know about the accident. 

"Nothing's wrong with Duff." Izzy sighed. "Sometimes what we call reality and what Duff calls reality isn’t compatible with each other.”

"But Lucas said…" Slash bit his lips.

"Lucas said what?" Izzy snapped and suddenly Slash thought he saw the chainsaw-murderer lurking behind the dark eyes. 

"Just because he's Duff," Slash mumbled. "Like he was special."

"Oh, that." Izzy grinned and Slash wondered what kind of comment he had expected. "Duff's daydreams can be a little … eerie at times."

"You mean like nightmares? About the devil?"

"Axl's got a big mouth," Izzy growled. "If I were you, I wouldn't believe everything Axl says. When it comes to keeping the line between reality and fantasy Axl is not too gifted either. No, I give you an example. A couple of months ago Duff spent a whole day calling Lucas 'Daddy'. He thought it was funny. Lucas thought it was funny, too, but only until he came home and his wife told him that she was pregnant."

Slash stared. "Are you saying…" he turned his head, but Duff was nowhere to be seen, "… are you saying that he's … dunno… psychic or something?"

Izzy grinned. "I'm not saying anything. I've just noticed that Duff's dreams sometimes are a little more real than is comfortable."

"Does that mean I should get myself a top-hat?" 

"What I'm saying is that in another time and place, somebody like Duff might have been treated with a lot of respect."

Slash tried a half-hearted smile. This was a mental institution. People were supposed to be … well… mental, and although Izzy appeared normal on the outside, there had to be a reason why he was here. Even if he wasn’t a chainsaw-murderer – and Slash wasn’t ruling the possibility out, yet - It was better to not take everything he said at face-value. 

Later that evening Slash got another opportunity to wonder about the paper-fleet. Duff hadn't found the top-hat, and therefore he did his best to fold one out of a stack of old newspapers Lucas had given him. Slash watched him with fascination. It was just as Izzy had said, he lived in a world that had nothing in common with everybody else's reality, and he talked about it as if he wasn't even aware that nobody understood him. 

"I can't get it right." Duff looked at the mess in front of him. "I can't make a top-hat out of paper, I'm sorry."

"It doesn't matter," Slash said. "I don't need a top-hat."

"No? You're not upset that you've lost it?"

"It's OK. I …" Slash stopped and turned around to the TV that was blaring in the corner. 

"A seaquake with a magnitude of 7.5 on the Richter scale was measured in the Pacific Ocean, fifty miles from the Indonesian coastline. Several fishing-boats are still missing. Rescue-activities…"

Somebody switched the channel to another program. 

"Who turned on the news?" Thomas, the orderly from the evening-shift, asked and confiscated the remote-control. "Some of us here are easy to upset, so we all know that we have to avoid programs like that." 

Duff didn't react.

"Did you hear that?" Slash asked. "Did you know it would happen? You've heard it before, didn't you? That's why you made the ships. You have seen it on TV?"

"Hear what?" Duff asked. "That we're not allowed to watch the news? Oh yes, I know that. All we're allowed to watch are game-shows and only from eight to nine. One hour TV per day is enough." He sighed. "Did you like dinner? I mean, I do like potatoes, OK, but not if they're all hard in the middle. They're always hard in the middle, you know." He frowned. "I guess they are not allowed to keep the oven on for more than a certain time either and that’s why. Just like the TV. They are just not able to cook the potatoes long enough. Maybe they should buy smaller ones."

"I don't think so," Slash said. 

"Izzy doesn't think so either. I was just wondering."

"You're not psychic," Slash said. "You've just switched on the TV today, and because you're not allowed to, you don't tell."

"Tell what?" Duff turned soft, confused eyes on Slash. 

"Leave him alone."

Slash jumped and then slumped back onto his chair. "Is this a habit of yours? Sneaking up behind people?" 

"Leave him alone, OK?" Izzy glared at him and Slash could almost hear the hum of the chainsaw.

"I just…"

"Leave. Him. Alone. Isn't it enough that he has to deal with all this shit? Is it necessary that everybody torments him with questions? He doesn't predict the lottery-results. He doesn't know either whether your Daddy is really your Daddy or whether your girl-friend is cheating on you, so leave him the fuck alone. There's nothing practical behind what Duff knows and doesn't know."

"Did you like the potatoes?" Duff asked as soon as Izzy made a pause to catch his breath.

"They were disgusting." 

“Weren’t they? I wanted to have a look at the oven, but Samantha threw me out of the kitchen. I tried to explain it to her, the thing with the cooking time, you know. I mean, it’s not her fault if she isn’t allowed to keep the oven on long enough. All they have to do is buy smaller potatoes, but she got really angry.”

Izzy cast Slash a last warning glance before he reached for Duff's arm and pulled him up. "Come on, I've got something for you. To make up for the potatoes."

"M&Ms?" Duff's eyes obtained a hopeful gleam. 

"Better. Cigarette."

"What. Where?" Slash asked. He hadn't had a cigarette in days. They wouldn’t even give him one to help get over the worst cravings. 

Izzy cast him a pitying look. "I don't know where you might get one, I only know where Duff and me are going to have one. Don't forget to be in bed before curfew, Slash." He cocked his head. "Oh, and don't worry about Axl. They're giving him sleeping-pills when it's time for bed, so I don't think he'll be awake enough to kill you in your sleep."

Slash watched them leave. They were just making fun of him because he was the new guy. This was a mental institution, he reminded himself. They were all talking bullshit because they were all a few cents short of a dollar.


	2. Speak of the Devil

It was ten minutes until curfew and Izzy couldn’t find Duff. He had searched the dayroom, the dining room, had had a quick look through all of the patient rooms to make sure nobody was trying to get a blowjob out of him, and had even made a sweep through the bathrooms. That left only one place, the broom closet in the basement, and for Izzy it was a bit difficult to get there. 

Duff was as unthreatening as they came. The staff liked him, and they allowed him quite a bit more freedom than the rest of them got. Even the kitchen staff didn’t mind when he came for a visit, and Samantha, the bad-tempered cook, always had a treat for him. Unless he questioned her professionality, then she could even be rude to Duff. 

When there was a bit more time to make sure he didn’t get caught, sneaking down wasn’t that big of a problem for Izzy. But all he had were ten minutes, and he was one of those inmates who would find additional pills in his arsenal as soon as he set a toe across the line they had drawn for him. 

In the end, it didn’t matter. Pills or no pills, he had to get to Duff before Thomas, the orderly from the nightshift, did. If he didn’t manage, then it would be Duff who swallowed additional pills. Duff was confused enough as he was and Izzy was of the firm conviction that it was absolutely counterproductive to add drugs to his already befuddled mind. 

Duff had been doing good for quite some time, but having not only one but two full blown episodes in one single afternoon was a bit much. He could probably blame it on the new guy and his blasted top hat. And on the seaquake, but Izzy preferred blaming people over blaming natural disasters. It gave him something to direct his anger, and right now Slash was very high on his shit list. 

He squinted around the corner and checked the basement staircase. He was lucky. The staff was busy rounding up those who were never in bed by curfew, and the corridor was deserted. Quickly he ran down, made straight for the cupboard, slipped in and pulled the door shut behind him. 

“Duff?” he asked into the darkness. 

“Izzy?” Duff’s voice was timid, but it was a good sign that he spoke at all. “Is he gone?”

“Yeah,” Izzy said. “You can come out now.”

“Did he take his eyes with him?”

So it was the guy whose eyes popped out who had come to haunt Duff. There were a lot of creatures that scared the living shit out of him. He saw them everywhere and pretty much all the time. By now he was at least able to deal with most of that rabble and didn’t mention them anymore. Izzy only knew they were there when Duff was suddenly staring into space. Still, there were those few that drove him into hiding each time they showed their faces. 

The devil was the worst of all of them. Luckily, he appeared only now and then. The guy who kept losing his eyes was a bit lower on the terror scale, but still high enough to make Duff run for cover. 

“Yeah. I checked, no eyes anywhere. Come back up with me?” Izzy wrapped an arm around Duff’s shoulder and Duff hid his head against his neck. 

“You sure?”

Izzy kissed him onto his forehead. “Yeah. Nothing out there. Promise. But it’s late, and you have to pull yourself together, understood? You know what happens if Thomas finds you like this. He tells Hopton and Hopton schedules half a dozen extra sessions with you.”

Doc Hopton, Duff’s psychiatrist, was the last one Duff needed to see after an episode. In fact, Izzy thought, there was absolutely no reason for Duff to ever see Doc Hopton at all, because each time he came back more confused than before. When he was already in a vulnerable stage like this, the result was disastrous. 

Thomas didn’t have any beef with Duff, not the way he had with Izzy, but he liked his night shifts to be quiet and uneventful. Duff’s episodes were bothersome and disturbed the routine, and Thomas was quick to ask the doc on duty for additional drugs to make sure everybody slept. 

And so Izzy had made it his lifegoal to ensure nobody noticed when Duff slipped. Right now that meant he needed to have him in bed when the last check happened. They were running out of time and he couldn’t waste anymore of it on calming Duff down before he introduced him back to the realm of the living. All he could hope for was that Duff would keep his mouth shut until he had tucked him in. 

“Up you go,” he ordered and pulled at Duff’s arm. 

To his relief, Duff followed. The corridor was still empty, but when they had just made their way up the staircase, they ran into Thomas. 

“What have you been doing downstairs!” he snapped, not looking at Duff at all, but focussing all of his indignation on Izzy. They weren’t exactly friends, Izzy had to admit. 

“Duff lost one of his M&Ms,” he replied, keeping his face as devoid of expression as he could muster. “A red one. It rolled down the stairs and you know how he gets when he loses his sweets.”

“And you helped him look!”

“Yeah. You know him, he might not find it, and then go further and further and forget it’s curfew. I just wanted to make sure he doesn’t get lost. You know Doc Chau and his freaking buddy-system. He told me I should look after Duff, so that’s what I’m doing.”

It wasn’t even a lie, but if Chau knew how far Izzy took the whole ‘look after Duff’ shit, he would make sure they were separated again as fast as he could. 

“And did you find it?” There was still disbelief in Thomas’ voice. 

“Sure, did,” Izzy replied, hoping the smile he was trying to fake wouldn’t come out as a grimace. Smiling was not one of his personal strengths. 

Duff stood behind him, frozen in place, not looking at anybody. Lucas would now have tried to get him to confirm Izzy’s story, and then he would have realized that something was wrong. Luckily Thomas never made the effort to get anything out of Duff. It was too tedious for him to bother. 

“So, where is it?”

“Ate it. Duff did, not me.”

“After it had been rolling through the dirt?”

Izzy shrugged. “You know how Duff gets with his M&Ms. And the red ones are the best, or so he claims. Personally, I can’t taste a difference.”

Duff would indeed have eaten an M&M that had rolled down the stairs. He did like his candies and they were getting few enough of those. Izzy had done his best to set up a supply chain via one of the kitchen-helps, but the man wasn’t keen on losing his jobs and only ever delivered once in a blue moon. Of course, as they weren’t trafficking drugs, but only cigarettes and M&Ms, there wasn’t much money to be made, and Izzy felt a certain sympathy that the guy wasn’t risking his income for it.

“Get into your room,” Thomas muttered. “And the next time Duff loses M&Ms on the staircase, you tell somebody and don’t just go looking on your own. You’re not allowed downstairs, no exceptions.”

“Will do, boss,” Izzy said with another fake smile. It slipped off his face as soon as he turned his back on Thomas and pulled Duff with him towards their room. 

“You’re not willing to make things easy for me, huh?” he said when he had gotten him to sit down on his bed. “Why didn’t you come directly to me instead of hiding first?” 

“I don’t like it if he leaves his eyes lying around,” Duff said. “They keep looking at me while they’re rolling over the floor.”

“That sucks,” Izzy replied. “Need help undressing?” He started with Duff’s shirt. “But he took them with him. All gone. Let’s get you into bed and I promise, I’ll come over as soon as the doors are locked.”

“Would you?” Duff looked up hopefully. 

“If you want me to.”

Duff nodded. The promise brought some life back into him and he managed to undress and put on his sleepshirt all on his own. He crawled under the blanket and Izzy had just managed to get into his own bed, when the door was opened one last time before the lock turned for the night. 

Lying down with Duff in the evening was not a good idea. It was far too comfortable, and the risk of just falling asleep and being caught was too high. But sometimes Duff needed comfort and whenever that was the case, Izzy made an exception. As soon as the steps had faded, he slipped into bed with Duff and pulled him into his arm. Normally he managed to stay awake until Duff had fallen asleep, but this time it just wouldn’t work. 

“Sorry,” he whispered, when his eyes had closed all on their own for the third time. “Don’t manage tonight.”

“It’s OK,” Duff whispered. “Can I come to yours?”

That idea was marginally better. If they got caught in the morning, Izzy could always claim that he hadn’t noticed Duff joining him, and whoever was on duty would accredit the illegal sleeping arrangement to Duff being Duff. They wouldn’t be pleased, but they wouldn’t suspect anything sinister either. 

“OK,” he said therefore. “But you have to go back after latest half an hour.”

“Yeah,” Duff whispered. “I’ll take care.”

It was a stupid request because Duff had not real feeling for time. 

They curled up in Izzy’s bed and when Duff slipped a hand into his boxers, Izzy spread his legs and gave in. He was only human after all. 

After his arrival at St. John's, Izzy had for the first week inhabited a single room, had slept as much as they would let him, and had kept a firm distance from everybody else. He hadn't been thrilled when they had moved him to Duff. Duff, who sucked cock like a pro and who was everybody's whore. 

It had been annoying to watch him go to bed with traces of dried sperm around his mouth and smelling like a horny opossum. It had been a bit of a hassle, but in the end it had taken Izzy less than a month to put an end to it. Although Duff had a very relaxed attitude towards sex, he had seemed relieved - and had shown his gratefulness in the only way he knew. 

It hadn’t taken long until Izzy had started to reciprocate. He may be a bastard, but he wasn’t a selfish one. Duff had been astonished at first, as if nobody had ever done something like that for him, and had then participated with enthusiasm. Since then their arrangement stood. 

This night however, he didn’t manage to give back in kind. He didn’t even come, but fell asleep while Duff was still stroking his half-hard dick. Latest then, while he drifted off, it started to register that something was not as it was supposed to be. 

+++

The waking-alarm went off on the corridor, but Izzy still needed several minutes before he realized that it was indeed morning. His lids were swollen and his eyes felt glued shut. He forced them open anyway and swallowed against the dryness in his throat and the bad taste on his tongue. If there was one thing he didn't like, then it was being pulled out of bed by an impatient orderly. He sat up and looked over to Duff who was almost buried under his blanket, undisturbed by the noise of yelling and door-banging. 

Usually Izzy woke about half an hour before the alarm rang; enough time to join Duff for a few minutes of early-morning-cuddling – or whatever else they felt like doing - clean up and be back before the door was unlocked. Early-morning-cuddling was a lot less dangerous than late-night-cuddling.

"Fuck," Izzy mumbled and pushed his covers aside. "Do you feel just as fucked up as I do?" He crossed the room on legs that seemed to be made from lead and touched Duff's shoulder. "Hey, you're awake?"

There was no reaction and this time it wasn't the morning-alarm that rang in Izzy's ears. Duff wasn't that heavily drugged anymore, not since Izzy had developed a feeling for the terrors that haunted him, and calmed him down before anybody noticed that he was having another episode. Doc Hopton was delighted about this progress, which wasn't any progress at all. Duff didn't make one step without a legion of demons on his heels, he had just stopped telling each and everybody about them. Now he only came to Izzy. 

"Duff?"

Duff wasn't asleep, his eyes were wide open. Izzy knelt down next to the bed, but he didn't even catch a flicker of recognition. 

"Talk to me," he whispered while his fingers brushed over clammy skin. Not that he needed any further explanation. Only one demon held the power to paralyze Duff with fear. 

When the door was opened, Izzy noticed with a hint of relief that it was Lucas and not Matthew. Matthew, just like Thomas, didn't have the patience to deal with interruptions of the routine. If Duff was playing at being catatonic, he would just call one of the docs. 

"Izzy, out," Lucas ordered and switched on the light. "Don't make me come get you and you Duff, you're skinny enough, so I can't have you miss out on breakfast and …" He stopped and Izzy knew that he interpreted the situation correctly. 

"We're out in a minute," Izzy said pleadingly. 

"Bad night, huh?" Lucas joined him at the bed. "Come on, Duff, sit up."

Together they pulled him upright. Duff's eyes widened and he clutched Izzy's hand. 

"He was here," he stammered. "Did you see him?"

"No, I didn't." Izzy squeezed his fingers. "You've been dreaming, that's all."

Duff shook his head. "He was here. He talked to me. And he touched me." He shuddered.

Lucas sighed. "The devil doesn't exist. And even if, he has no reason to visit you of all people. You’re one of the good guys, Duff, the devil has no business with you. So come on, get up." He pulled Duff off the bed. "If you like you can talk to the doc about it."

Duff shook his head.

"Your choice," Lucas said. "But if you don't want to talk about it, then you're having a shower. And after that you're going to have breakfast, and you'll see, you'll feel much better in no time at all." He steered Duff towards the door. "You, too, Izzy. Gosh, what is it with you boys and water, huh?"

Izzy followed them. The bathroom was at the end of the corridor, ten showers and no privacy. They were the last and he spared a moment to stare Axl's curious glances down before he checked on the new guy. Slash was busy untangling his curls and from the look of it, that would keep him busy for the next time. 

Duff had calmed enough to act on auto-pilot. He stripped and stepped into a free slot while Lucas shooed Steven back under the shower. 

"I did wash, really," Steven whined.

"Then do it again." Lucas was not a bad guy, but he was a hardliner when it came to discipline. "It won't hurt you. It's a miracle that you don't have lies and fleas, really. And take care of all hidden corners, you don't want me to come and check, Stevie."

Izzy held his head under the spray. The temperature was preset to barely more than lukewarm, to prevent some idiot from burning himself. His piss was warmer than the showers. Out of the corner of his eyes Izzy watched Duff rubbing a bar of soap in his hands. He moved in slow-motion, but for once Lucas didn't rush him. Duff lathered up carefully, as if his skin still hurt from the devil's touch. 

For a moment Izzy's eyes lingered on the few scars Duff sported. He knew bullet-wounds when he saw them, but so far, he hadn't managed to find out how or why Duff had been shot. 

It was easy, though, to determine which one had been first. Size and shape of both scars were similar, so it was likely that both bullets had been fired from the same gun. The first one, into his upper thigh, hadn't been life-threatening, but had crippled him enough to allow for a second, more precise shot. Maybe Duff had tried to crawl away in a futile, but understandable attempt to escape, and so the next bullet had hit him from behind, barely an inch next to his spine. A bad shot, given the condition of the victim, but it had ended all hopes of flight. Duff had probably stayed conscious for a while. The hole in his lung would have robbed him of the ability to move and he would have been choking on his blood. A third bullet into the back of his head, easy to place in his state of total helplessness, would have ended it all.

So as interesting as the question why somebody had tried to kill Duff, was the one why he was still alive. 

When Duff turned around Izzy stalled for a second. 

"What's that?" he asked and pointed towards a hand-wide, red patch on his ribs. It didn't look like a hit, more like somebody had held a hot flat-iron to his skin. 

Duff looked down and shuddered when Izzy touched the bruise. 

"He's hurt me," he whispered. "His hands are so hot."

Izzy stared until Lucas prompted him to get a move on. 

"Are you sure you didn't get that anywhere else?" he asked while washing his hair, but Duff shook his head. 

He let it go for the moment. Izzy wasn't a religious person and the idea that in addition to his hallucinations, his visions and his encounters with various demons, Duff should now develop stigmata, was revolting. What was coming next? Bleeding hands and feet?

Breakfast was going down with the usual noise and hassling. Some of the guys were screaming, some were crying, others refused to eat or demanded more or different food. Breakfast was the worst of all meals and Izzy wouldn't have minded skipping it and having a cigarette instead. 

"Come on, Duff, eat." Lucas sat down next to him and put the plastic knife into his hand. "I'm not buttering your toast for you, so do it yourself, come on."

Chewing on his own bread, Izzy watched how Duff followed the order in agonizing slowness. Lucas seemed content though, especially as all hell broke loose at the other end of the hall.

"Stop that!" He jumped up and left Duff to his butter-scraping. "The next one who thinks it's funny to pour tea over his neighbour is going to learn what I consider as funny!"

Axl used the occasion to pick up his tray and join them at their table. He looked like Izzy felt, still fighting to keep his eyes open and not really responsive yet. In Axl's case it was understandable. He was a terror during daytimes, but at nights he was ten times worse. Nobody got a wink of sleep if Axl was awake, so each evening he was put to bed with chemical assistance. 

Izzy tried to remember what kind of pills he had taken himself, but couldn't tell. 

It could have been a mistake. During late afternoon all pills were sorted into little boxes and before bed time they all had to line up and take their doses. Somebody might have popped a wrong pill into his box or he might have swallowed somebody else's drugs. Sadly, he had stopped believing in coincidences a long time ago. 

"What do you want, Axl?" Izzy asked eventually when he started to be disgusted by having to watch him shredding his toast. Axl might be too tired to eat in the morning, but he was never too tired to poke his nose into other people's affairs. 

"Is it true?" Axl looked at Duff. "You had another encounter tonight?"

Duff had just started eating, but now he dropped his toast back onto the plate. 

"How about you go somewhere else and mind your own fucking business," Izzy growled. 

"So, it's true?" Axl rubbed his eyes. "I just wanted to know." He started to stuff his mouth with chunks of his crumbled breakfast. "It's funny because we were just talking about it yesterday, you know."

"Yeah, which might just have triggered it, asshole," Izzy said and tried to remember if something in form, surface or taste, had been different about his pills. Not that it required wizardry to exchange one little white pill for another. "Who has the keys to the drug-cabinet?" he asked. "The docs, Thomas and Matt, right?" 

Usually Thomas gave them their candy in the evening and Matthew in the morning.

Axl nodded. "Yeah, but everybody can get the keys. Dr Fergus always leaves his in the top left drawer of his desk."

"Are you sure?" 

"Yep. Why, wanna have your own little selection?"

Izzy shook his head. "He really leaves the keys in his desk?"

"He thinks nobody knows." Axl grinned. "But I've seen him take them out already twice. Not that it matters much because his room is locked, too. Does it make a difference which lock you have to pick?"

No, it didn't make a difference should Izzy want to get his hands on forbidden drugs, but each staff-member had the keys to all offices and therapy-rooms. It meant that basically everybody had access to the whole chemical arsenal. 

+++

Slash had survived the first night in his new home. He hadn’t slept much, hadn’t fallen asleep until the early morning hours. He had tried to just go back to bed after breakfast, but had been informed in a tone that brooked no contradiction, that sleeping during the day was not encouraged. 

Instead they had all lined up in front of the pharmacy and received their morning candy. 

He spotted Duff and Izzy a couple steps before himself and Axl. Yesterday Izzy had looked moody and bad tempered, today he just looked exhausted. 

“The devil’s been back,” Axl whispered behind him, when he caught him staring. Slash’s look immediately turned to Duff who stood close enough to Izzy to crawl into him. Then they reached the distribution deck and to his surprise Slash watched how Matthew ordered Izzy to open his mouth and popped the pills into it before handing him a cup of water. 

“All of it, Izzy!” he said when Izzy handed it back after a single sip. 

Izzy rolled his eyes, but he emptied the cup, and then he opened his mouth again and Matthew checked for residues. 

“Izzy managed to skip his drugs for weeks,” Axl said. “But eventually they found out, and, boy, did he get in trouble for that. So now he gets special treatment. Most of the orderlies don’t like Izzy. They feel like he’s always doing something behind their back.”

“And is he?” Slash asked. 

Axl shrugged. “Yeah, but he’s good at not getting caught. Really good. Sneaky bastard. He’s definitely fucking Duff behind their back and I have no idea why nobody notices. Fuck, there are times when you can smell it on them.”

They had reached the desk themselves and Axl fell silent. 

“What are these?” Slash asked when he was handed a tiny plastic cup with three little pills at the bottom. 

“Ask the doc,” Matthew replied. “You’re scheduled for therapy anyway.”

“I’d like to know before,” Slash stalled, but when he got a dark look, he just swallowed. The last thing he wanted was getting Izzy’s treatment. 

Behind him Axl received what accumulated to almost a handful of pills and Slash wondered if there would be a repeat of the drama from the evening before, when Axl had been adamant about not taking any drugs. Today, however, he eyed them with disgust, but took them all in one huge gulp that made him gag after he had swallowed. 

They returned to the dayroom afterwards and for a lack of things to do, Slash trailed along after Axl. 

“Which doc did they assign you?” Axl asked when they had settled on one of the couches. Axl, it seemed, liked to have his back against the wall and so they had retreated to the far end of the room. 

“His name is Johnson.” Slash looked at the sheet of paper they had given him and that detailed his schedule of therapy and more therapy and … oh no, gardening. 

Axl hmmed. “I’ve got him too. He’s an asshole. But they all are.”

Slash agreed. He had amble experience with therapy. His Mom had dragged him from one psychologist to another since he had been a teenager, and while ‘asshole’ might be a bit hard, he hadn’t like them either. Their insistence that he needed to talk about his problems, tell them what was going on inside him, how he was feeling, it was unnerving. He didn’t know what his problems were. That was the problem after all. He couldn’t put his feelings into words, and he definitely didn’t want to analyse any of them. He just wanted them to go away. 

He sat and looked out of the window while Axl, undisturbed by the lack of response, chatted on. Eventually Lucas came and picked him up. 

“Today I show you the way,” he said while they were taking the staircase to the upper level, “but in future I expect you to be in time on your own.”

Slash nodded. What else could he do. They had stripped him of any autonomy he might once have owned, and now he was turned into just another little cogwheel in the huge apparatus that was St. John’s. 

He entered the therapy room, closed the door behind himself, and looked at the grey-haired man who was sitting in an armchair and smiling as if he couldn’t be happier to be finally meeting him. He stood up to shake his hand, then motioned towards a couch, and they both sat down again. 

"How do you feel?" Dr Johnson leant back in his armchair and started the clock that sat on a little table next to him. 

Slash shrugged. "OK, I guess." He let his eyes travel over the scarce interior of the therapy-room. There wasn't much to catch his attention, a few potted plants, a large abstract painting on the far wall and a couple of shelves with books. 

"You guess? You're not sure?"

"Yeah." Slash looked at the clock. "I'm OK," he added. He had to cooperate. None of the shrinks here would just assume that he was OK. This wasn't a when-in-doubt-situation. He had to convince this man in front of him that there was nothing wrong with him, or else he would spend a lot of time sitting on this, admittedly comfortable, couch and look at his neatly trimmed beard, his steel-rimmed glasses and his slightly outdated tweed-suit. 

"Are you happy with your room?"

"Yes." Slash was determined to be happy with everything. He would be positive and life-embracing. Or was it better to make it clear that he didn't like it enough to spend more than maybe a month at this place? A month? Whom was he kidding? In a month he would have lost his mind for real. 

"I'm sure you have already noticed that we are only a small institution. We're not specialized, but we don't consider that as a disadvantage. So you are going to meet people with very different problems from your own."

Slash nodded. 

"Now, how do you get along with your roommate?"

"OK." Good! He should have said good. Or did that mean he was mad, too? Maybe getting along with Axl would be interpreted against him. Fuck, this was more difficult than he had thought.

"What did you do so far? Did Axl show you around?"

"Yes, he showed me the house. And I met a few of the guys." Slash wiped his hands on his pants. Should he mention how Axl had had a breakdown in the evening, when he had refused to take his pills? He had screamed and kicked and it had taken two men to hold him down and a third one to feed him his drugs. Slash was now convinced that he shouldn't have said he got along well with Axl. 

"Tell me a bit more. Whom did you meet?"

"Izzy," Slash looked at the clock again and wondered if it was broken. The hands hadn’t moved at all. "And Duff. Is Duff really psychic?" Fuck, now he had blown it for good. He could just as well stand up and declare that he wore his mother's dresses when she wasn't at home, just like that guy in Psycho, and that he enjoyed torturing little animals. 

Dr Johnson didn't twitch. Maybe his expression had lost a little bit of its encouraging friendliness, but at least he hadn't pulled out his prescription block, yet. 

"Usually I don't make a habit out of discussing one patient with another one. I'm aware that what I'm going to say now is outside professional discretion, but I definitely won't tolerate any kind of …cult around any of our charges. Especially not if it is doing said charge more harm than good."

"Sorry," Slash mumbled. 

"No, it's alright. I was just surprised how fast you were informed about Duff's alleged … abilities. I'm trying to put a few things straight for you: Duff is a complicated case. His hallucinations are persistent and so far, our success to get them under control is limited. To add to the difficulties, we know nothing about his past. We don't even know if Duff is his first name, his last name or simply a nickname. It has been impossible to find his family and learn anything about his upbringing and his medical history. Apparently, this lack of a past adds to the mystery around his person."

"He just appeared out of nowhere?" Fuck, couldn't he stop asking stupid questions? He sounded like a twelve-year-old who had read too many comics. 

"Duff didn't appear out of nowhere." Dr Johnson cleaned his glasses. "He was picked up in Los Angeles where he had apparently lived on the streets for some time, earning his living as good as he could. Which was more bad than good, to be precise. He has been brought here and I dare say that despite our difficulties to control his hallucinations, he has made huge progress. He is calmer and far less confused. This is largely an effect of the environment. He feels safe and cared for, which might very well be more than he has ever known in his life. I would prefer to continue this development instead of upsetting him by trying to read the future out of his hallucinations. If you like you can treat them like newspaper-horoscopes. They're so vague that you will always find something that fits. And just before you ask, no, I've never seen the devil anywhere inside these walls."

"Sorry," Slash said again. It was hard to imagine Duff even more confused than he already was, but he doubted that his amazing progress was due to the peaceful environment of St. John's. He was calm because Izzy was there to sooth him. Strangely enough Duff found solace and comfort in the company of a chainsaw-murderer, who gave him chocolate and cigarettes and, if Axl was correct, fucked him when nobody noticed. 

"No need to be sorry." Dr Johnson put his glasses back up. "Now that we've answered all your questions, let's talk a little bit about you. What do you expect from your stay here? What are your goals?" He folded his hands over his stomach and Slash had the feeling that the interesting part of the session was over. It was burning on his tongue to ask whether Izzy was really a chainsaw-murderer, but was pretty sure that the question wouldn't be appreciated. 

He crossed his eyes to catch another glimpse on the clock. It had to be broken. No actual working clock could move this slowly.

"Dunno," he mumbled and thought desperately about something he might try to achieve during this stay. "Stay clean?"

"Why do you want to stay clean?"

Why? Why? Because everybody was up his back about it, because everybody had complained and cried and worried over him. Because he never wanted to return to a place like this. Sadly, this would never be a valid explanation for somebody like Dr Johnson. Slash got the sinking feeling that he wouldn't have a chance to leave this mad-house until he managed to invent a believable answer to that question.


	3. Roots

The days at St John’s passed with agonizing slowness. Every day was just as the day before, nothing ever interrupted the routine. The only difference was which type of therapy they were subjected to or what type of bland food they were fed for dinner. 

A few of the other inmates seemed rather normal, but most of them made Slash wonder if he hadn’t been sent to the wrong place or at least the wrong ward. He was a junky, for fuck’s sake, shouldn’t he be locked up with other junkies? Wasn’t that how it was normally done? He wasn’t a case for high security prison. 

He took a liking to Duff, though. Crazy as he was, his soft brown eyes and gentle smiles where endearing, and listening to his outlandish ideas was entertaining. The only obstacle on his way to befriending Duff was Izzy. Slash wasn’t sure what his problem was and he was even less sure he wanted to find out. The guy was creepy as hell, with the way he prowled around them and watched every move he made from dark, impenetrable eyes. Like a dog defending a bone nobody even wanted to take away from him. 

So far, Slash had managed to avoid any direct confrontations with Izzy, but today he was out of luck. 

He had just gone to take a leak in the downstairs bathroom – the one that was usually empty – when Izzy came in and, if his posture was any indication, not because he felt any pressing needs. 

“Hi,” Slash said, trying for nonchalant. He quickly finished, washed his hands, and decided he would play it the way he had done as a kid, when he had been taking the forbidden shortcut over the scrapyard. Mr O’Leary’s German Shepherd somehow reminded him of Izzy, down to the watchful eyes and suspicious attitude. 

He did his best to appear calm and non-threatening, but not intimidated either because one didn’t want to make a hunter think one was easy prey and … oh fuck, he was in over his head. Just like Mr O’Leary’s German Shepherd, Izzy wasn’t fooled by his attempts to bluster his way through the danger. 

“What do you want from Duff?” Izzy asked without preamble, blocking the way out. 

“Nothing,” Slash replied. “I just like him.”

“You like him.” 

It wasn't a question.

“Yeah?” 

There were steps outside and Slash wondered if he should scream for help. It might get him help, but it might just as well get him a shot to calm him down and a night tied to the bed. Somebody was always screaming here, and people tended to not take it serious anymore. 

Izzy had heard the steps, too. With a move so quick that Slash was already walking before he noticed what was happening, he grabbed his arm, pulled him into one of the stalls, and closed the door behind them. 

“Try again,” he said, leaning against the door. 

“I like him!” Slash now snapped. He should be scared and, yes, he was, but what was he supposed to do about it? It was not likely that Izzy was hiding a chainsaw somewhere, all he could do was dunk his head into the toilet. Or maybe break his neck, but if he was really going to stay imprisoned in this hell, then he might soon be asking him to end his misery anyway. “Fuck, sometimes I think he’s the only normal person in this shit house. And that includes the staff!”

It seemed to be the right thing to say because, even if he did his best to still look menacing, Izzy’s posture relaxed. 

“I know that Axl keeps telling shit about Duff,” he said. “If you touch him…”

“I won’t,” Slash quickly said, finally understanding where they were heading. The blow jobs. Izzy was staking his claim. “Yeah, Axl talks, but I have absolutely no interest in … that.”

Izzy snorted. “Good for you. But just in case your libido makes a sudden return ... stick to Axl. In fact, I think it would do him good. Might just be what he needs. You will have to get the stick out of his ass first, but then ...” For a moment he seemed to amuse himself with the image. “Just remember,” he added then, his focus suddenly back on Slash, “Duff’s not doing business anymore.”

“Noted,” Slash replied, not willing to delve any deeper into the idea of sex with Axl. 

Izzy nodded and left and Slash slumped against the wall. Axl was right, chainsaw or no chainsaw, Izzy was scary as fuck. 

+++

After their little heart-to-heart, Izzy was almost nice. No glares, no threats, no silent promises of a violent death, and when Slash spent time with Duff - yes, all of a sudden he was allowed - he sometimes even joined them. With Slash came Axl and after a while, Izzy tolerated him, too. 

Eventually Slash realized, much to his surprise, that he liked him. Izzy was … sane, for a better word. He treated his situation with dry humour and sarcasm. Slash more and more got the feeling that in the midst of this overregulated life he had carved out a little corner that was all his, and that, no matter how hard they tried, not even the most determined of the staff could take away from him. 

Izzy had managed to keep an ounce of independence in a place that did whatever it took to take all independence away from them, and for that alone, he had Slash’s admiration. Outwardly he complied with what was requested of him, never gave any trouble, knew which rules could and which couldn’t be bent, but as soon as those in charge turned their back on him, he did whatever he wanted. 

The one pain in their life not even Izzy could evade though, was therapy. One evening they had made a hit list of what type of therapy was the worst. Izzy felt a deep hatred for group therapy, and the demands to bare his soul to the other inmates. Slash didn’t believe for one moment that anything of the stuff he made up during those sessions was true, but just being forced to sit in a circle and come up with some bullshit was rubbing Izzy raw.

Once he had seen Duff offer him an M&M afterwards, a clear indication that Izzy was only one spark away from a major explosion. Slash didn’t want to think about what an Izzy-explosion might mean for the environment. All that smouldering lava he kept so carefully contained just going ‘boom’. He was convinced that Axl’s biweekly outbreaks were a flash in a pan compared to Izzy finally losing his shit. 

Slash didn’t think group therapy was that bad. Just like Izzy he invented some stories when he was prompted to talk. When he had received his share of encouraging words and compassionate pats on his shoulder, he hid once more behind his hair. Usually Axl talked non-stop for about ninety percent of the time anyway, until everybody’s eyes were glazing over. Once even the group leader had nodded off for a second. No, his personal foe was gardening therapy. Never ever would he understand how digging through the dirt was supposed to keep him from returning to his junky ways. Did they expect him to apply for a plot in downtown L.A. once they released him? Not likely. 

At the back of the property was a huge vegetable garden, surrounded by a six feet high fence to keep them away from those patients at St. John’s that were neither dangerous nor a flight risk. Every other day they were forced to slave away between rows of peas and salad and carrots and beetroot. 

To Slash it was pure hell. Why somebody would want him of all people to tend to their vegetables was beyond him. Apparently, everybody had to do it now and then, because tending to tender plants and watching them grow was good for the psyche. And because it was so productive. And also, because it meant they produced something they could eat themselves afterwards, and thus reap the benefits of their labour first-hand. Slash had absolutely no ambition to still be there once the labour of their hands would bear fruits. 

It was only made bearable by the fact that they were all four in the same cohort. Today was such a day, all of them being outside under the mild spring sun, and Slash looked in despair at the tray of seedlings that had been pushed into his hands. He was supposed to separate the fuckers from each other and find a new home for them in the piece of earth in front of him. Yes, surely this would cure him from his addictions. Or not. If anything, it made his cravings for a fix even stronger. 

Two rows ahead, Axl was doing … whatever. It was clearly something that required lots of violence. Even the most dedicated orderlies had given up on placing delicate seedlings into Axl’s hands, they only ended flung at somebody’s head sooner or later. So, he was now mainly tasked with getting the beds ready, digging and sifting soil and preparing the canvas for the rest of them to work with. In theory. Usually they were presented with a wasteland of churned up soil, something that looked as if a hoard of wild boars had made its way through it. 

Izzy, on the other hand, was astonishingly adept at gardening. Either he had been here for at least a decade, or he had already known how it worked before his arrival. Right now, he was methodically putting up trellises, and encouraged tiny pea seedlings to hook their tendrils around them. Those fuckers might even live long enough to actually produce a harvest. At least if they were lucky enough to keep Izzy as their caretaker. 

“Country boy?” Slash had asked him the first time he had been met with this weirdly domestic scene, but Izzy had only glared at him, and had deliberately stepped onto Slash’s row of freshly germinated radishes. Sometimes Izzy was really an asshole, and other times he was just plain cool. But he never talked about his past and events like hat made Slash learn fast to not ask. 

With a sigh, Slash sat down on the ground and tried to fiddle the plants he had been given apart. The blasted roots, tiny and easily torn off, got tangled around each other, ripped off, and left him with quickly wilting grass-like green blades. He didn’t even know what they were, as nobody had bothered to tell him. 

He had manged to get maybe a dozen sorry looking plants into the soil, when Izzy’s dirty shoes suddenly appeared next to him. 

“Let me.” He crouched down next to Slash, took a clump of plants out of his hand and quickly separated them from each other. “They always assume you’re fucking up on purpose, and not because you’re a colossal idiot.”

“And that might be why?” Slash asked with a grin. 

Izzy grinned back. “In my case? Maybe because I have given them reason to think that way. Now and then. Anyway, they won’t give you your allowance if you don’t do your job.”

“Allowance?” Slash asked, while he tried to make the seedlings stand somehow upright in their new home. Maybe if he put them deeper into the earth. Up to their tips, probably. 

“Water,” Izzy admonished. “They have barely any roots, if you let them fall dry, that’s it for them. Yeah, allowance. It’s not much. Even prison work pays better.”

Slash looked up, but quickly returned his attention to the plants. It didn’t happen often that Izzy slipped. He might have just said it as an offhand remark, but somehow Slash wouldn’t have been surprised if Izzy had served jailtime. He was far too normal to be considered loony-bin-material. 

“Yeah, anyway. For as long as you need my help with this shit, I get ten percent.”

“What?” Slash bristled, but caved in quickly. If Izzy was right, then he wouldn’t get paid at all without outside help, and Izzy wasn’t one to just help him out of the goodness of his heart. Ten percent even seemed reasonable. He could demand fifty and all Slash could do was pay him or fight with his plants all on his own. 

“Look,” he nudged Slash’s arm, and unobtrusively pointed over to where Duff was toiling away. He had been tasked with weeding the lettuce bed, but instead he had meticulously pulled out each and every lettuce plant, and now planted the weeds in long, straight rows, each one interspaced perfectly from the next. 

Slash snickered and even Izzy’s lips twitched upwards for a change. 

“Will he get into trouble?” Slash asked, but Izzy shook his head. 

“He’s Duff. They will yell, but, no. He won’t.”

When somebody finally noticed what was happening, Duff had already destroyed the lettuce production of the entire year. 

“For God’s sake, Duff!” Leo, the orderly on duty yelled. “Stop that! Now! What … argh, I don’t believe this. Pull those out and put the lettuce back in. Izzy!”

“Who, me?” Izzy stood up from where he was still crouching next to Slash. 

“You knew what he was doing.” Leo came over to them. 

“What doing?” Izzy asked with feigned innocence. “I was being all social and well-adjusted and helping Slash with the leeks. He sucks at gardening.”

Leeks? Slash thought. All that trouble because of freaking leeks? He didn’t even like leek!

“Don’t try to fool me. I know you were having an eye on Duff. Now go and make sure he does it right.”

“What am I, head gardener?” Izzy yelled after Leo’s retreating back. “Do I at least get a raise?” But then he winked at Slash and joined Duff and his weeds. 

“Don’t mind him,” Izzy said when Duff was looking upset at his row of plants. 

“I like them.” Duff sounded desperate. “Leo says they have to go, but they are pretty.”

“We’ll just keep them,” Izzy replied, then he checked what Leo was doing, and pressed a quick kiss onto Duff’s mouth. “Look, we just…,” He sorted through the discarded lettuce plants, picked those out that were still redeemable and arranged them around Duff’s weed plantation. “See? Nobody will notice.”

Slash returned to his leeks, Duff was smiling at Izzy, and Axl mutilated another piece of earth. Life was as peaceful as it could get at St. John’s.


	4. Fly!

After they were done with gardening, they still weren’t allowed back inside. If given the chance, Slash would have crawled into his bed and slept for the rest of the day, but instead he was shooed out of the vegetable garden, and into one of the cattle pens of the main yard for even more sun and fresh air. 

"Don't think you can decide anything for your own," Axl had said when Slash had tried to convince Leo that he wasn't in dire need of any more recreational outdoor activities. "That's why you're here after all, right? 'cause you don't know what's good for you."

Axl didn't seem to be too keen on fresh air either. He steered towards a bench under an oak-tree and for lack of anything better to do, Slash followed him. Some of those who hadn’t been on gardening duty, and were only now joining them outside, behaved like dogs let out to play. He wouldn't have been surprised if somebody had started digging holes into the ground. 

Izzy kicked his heels in the far corner of their division, alone, without Duff attached to his hip. Duff, it seemed, was exempt from any more outdoor activities. Probably because he was Duff. It seemed to be the excuse for pretty much any kind of special treatment there was. 

"Today is my anniversary," Axl said after an eternity of silence. "I should get a cake, I'd say."

"Anniversary?" Slash asked absentmindedly. 

He wished for a cigarette. If they really got an allowance, maybe he could tap Izzy’s supply chain. He still had no idea how it worked, and Izzy wouldn’t tell. The bastard wouldn’t share either. But maybe he would sell. He had to keep Duff in M&Ms after all, and that couldn’t be cheap. It was probably the reason why Izzy now got all the blowjobs, because he was facilitating Duff’s chocolate habit. Either that or the fact that Duff wouldn’t smile for anybody the way he smiled for Izzy, trusting, radiant, at peace. 

"Yeah." Axl pulled his feet onto the bench and rested his chin on his knees. He looked small like that, almost like a child, and the screaming maniac who showed his face about every other day seemed very far away. "Today it's ten years since I've been outside."

"Ten years!" Slash forgot all thoughts about cigarettes. "You've been here for ten years?"

Axl shook his head. "Not here. But it's been ten years since I was committed. I was fourteen."

"What for?" They hadn’t talked about it so far. Despite all his constant drivelling, Axl hadn’t yet mentioned the actual reason for being where he was. Sure, he was a lunatic, but not bad enough to warrant a lifetime in a mental institution. He screamed and yelled and smashed things, but Slash had yet to see him attack somebody physically. It all seemed more like blown up toddler tantrums to him. 

Axl’s gaze lost focus for a moment and he stared into space like Duff sometimes did; as if he was chasing a memory that was just outside his grasp. It lasted only for a couple of seconds, then he shook his head and returned to the present. 

"The teachers said I had a problem and my stepfather jumped at the opportunity. He dragged me from one psychiatrist to the next until one of them gave him what he wanted and signed the fucking papers. And once you’re in, getting out again is not so easy. I spent the first two years in Chicago, the Western State Hospital. That was a dump, I tell you. During winter the water was running down the walls, mould everywhere and the smell… But I spare you that."

Slash shivered. Ten years. He would throw temper tantrums, too, if he was kept inside for ten years. 

"I didn't mind when I had to leave. Eventually a complete wing was so dilapidated it had to be shut down and a whole bunch of us had to be relocated." He snorted. "The director jumped at the opportunity to have me on that bus, believe me."

Slash waited. He had the feeling that Axl wanted to talk, that he wasn't just providing information. Maybe it was because of the date, but Slash had the feeling that although he was never really alone, he had still remained lonely. Did Axl consider him as a friend? Since when? And did he even want to be Axl’s friend? So far, he had seen the two of them as fellows in misery. 

"You won't believe how hard it is to find a free bed in places like these,” Axl went on. “Makes you wonder what that tells you about the state this country is in, huh? Anyway, they didn't know what to do with me, and so they shipped me to the General Hospital first, where I spent a couple of months on the closed ward. Then they found somebody who would take me. It was in Denver. When I turned 18, they threw me out. One of the doctors knew somebody in Phoenix, somebody who still owed him, and so I went down to Phoenix for another year. Yeah, and then I came here. That was five years ago. So far it looks as if they are going to keep me."

"You've seen quite a bit of the country, huh?" It was a stupid joke and Slash bit his tongue as soon as he'd made it. 

"I don't even know anymore how the world looks outside," Axl said and suddenly Slash felt something more than compassion for him. A sort of fury that made no sense at all. Axl was a pain in the ass, but he didn’t deserve this. 

"I don't know what music they play today, what books there are. I know only what they give me here, what they let me watch on TV, and what outdated magazines you find in the dayroom. But I'm inside for so long now, if they drag in stuff from five years ago, it's still new to me."

"What about … your family?" Slash asked, not sure if it was a topic he was allowed to broach. 

"Are you joking? They're happy to be rid of me. I haven’t heard from my Mom in years. And I can’t say I’m crying either. Even if they asked, I wouldn't let them visit. My sister still writes now and then.” Axl snorted, doing his best to hide his desolation behind a tough façade. “The year after they brought me here, she still sent the Christmas card to Phoenix." 

He turned his head away, and Slash fought down the sudden fear that maybe he would end just like Axl, that he would never be released, just shipped from one institution to the next like an unwanted parcel, until the world had forgotten he even existed. His own Mom and Grandma still cared for him. At least he hoped they did. There hadn’t been any contact, allegedly because it wouldn’t be good for him at this point in his treatment, but what if they were glad that they could finally hand all the worries about his wellbeing to somebody else? Maybe they slept better now that they knew for sure that the police wouldn’t knock at their door and ask them to identify the guy that had been found on a public toilet with a needle in his arm. And maybe they wanted their life to stay that way. 

He put an arm around Axl’s shoulder, expecting him to shake it off, but instead Axl leant into the embrace. For a while they sat in silence under the oak tree, contemplating their respective shitheap of a life and probably both wondering, where they had taken the wrong turn. 

Then, all of a sudden, Axl freed himself out of Slash’s embrace and jumped off the bench. 

"Oh, holy shit," he exclaimed. “Holy fucking shit, that's gonna mean trouble."

"What's wrong?" Slash followed his gaze to the roof of the building and then he saw it, too.

"Duff!" Axl yelled. "You idiot, don't move, you fucking nutcase! Sit down! Now!"

Duff balanced over the ridge, arms outstretched and carefully putting one foot in front of the next. 

They weren't the only ones who had noticed. Axl's scream had alarmed the orderlies, and within seconds everybody ran to get a better view. Everybody except Izzy. Izzy made back straight for the house, ditched at least two orderlies who tried to stop him, managed to get over the chain link fence so fast, Slash made a mental note to ask whether he could train him, and then he was inside the building, and out of view. 

"Duff!" Axl yelled again, but Slash grabbed him and clamped a hand over his mouth. 

"Stop yelling," he hissed when Axl struggled and tried to bite. "If you startle him, he might fall!"

But Axl wasn't the only one yelling anymore. 

"Look!" Steven called out when Duff stumbled and caught himself with flapping arm-movements. "He's flying away. Fly," he started to sing then. "Spread your wings and fly away. No one can hold you back now, baby. So, spread your wings and fly now, baby. Spread your wings and fly fly fly."

Within minutes people were screaming, yelling and waving. Duff stopped and turned to look at them, which caused another bout of arm-flailing. Slash felt his heart beat in his throat. He desperately looked around for anything that might soften his inevitable fall, but there was nothing. There wasn’t even lawn around the house, just concrete and cobble stones. 

He was in for another near heart failure, when Duff did finally sit down, only to slide down the roof until he stopped with his feet in the eaves gutter. How he managed to not tumble over the rim was beyond Slash, but he did and looked around as if checking where to go next. 

"Fly!" Steven screamed and waved his arms. "Come on, dude, fly away!"

"Shut up, you idiot!" Axl yelled and slapped Steven over the head. "Don't make him jump, for fuck's sake."

The slap couldn't have been hard, but Steven wailed nevertheless. 

"Enough!" Somebody yelled and then everything went very fast. "Inside!" Lucas roared so loud, he could even be heard over Steven's screaming. "Everybody inside, come on, now, inside and into your rooms. And I mean everybody, Axl, and I mean now!"

Slash didn't want to go, not when Duff was now turning around and crawling along the eaves gutter, his knees pressing into the roof and his hands searching for hold where there was no real hold. Somebody grabbed his arm and steered him towards the entrance. He tried to shake off the hand, but there was no give and Slash gave up his resistance. For at least half an hour there was one hell of a ruckus in the corridors, until finally all patients were sorted into their rooms and the doors locked up behind them. 

+++

When Izzy had seen Duff balance on the roof, he had acted on instinct. Getting him down was the only objective, and in order to get him down he had to get in and up to the attic. Unfortunately, he had just reached the hall, when his dash was stopped by Thomas and Matthew. Izzy was fast and he knew how to hold himself in a fight, but he hadn’t the bulk needed to get past those two human battering rams, and after over a year at St. John’s there was no denying it: he was out of shape. 

They had him down so fast it was embarrassing. He tried to kick and even bite and he spew out every threat and obscenity that came to his mind, but it was of no use. They held him down, spread eagled on his belly, and he knew he had lost when somebody pulled down his pants. Somebody else arrived with a syringe, and then his limbs went lax. He was only dimly aware how he was lifted off the ground, laid onto a stretcher and wheeled off. 

‘Duff,’ he thought helplessly, and while his mind was pulled down into a tar pit, he only hoped that somebody would get him off the roof before they found the time to alarm Hopton. If Hopton got to Duff first, chances were high that he would rather jump than let anybody convince him to come down. 

+++

"Fuck!" Axl spat. "One time something interesting happens, and they lock us up." He paced the few steps between door and window before he eventually settled on his bed. "And we're not even on the right side of the house, we won’t see anything of it."

"They'll get him down, won't they?" Slash asked. 

There was no sense in going frantic and he wouldn’t. He would stay calm and composed and not give in to the terror that threatened to grasp him. Several of his friends had died from overdoses and he absolutely refused to lose even one single person more. Duff would be OK. So many people wanted him to be OK, there was no chance things would end in any other way than with Duff just being that: OK. 

"What is he doing up there anyway?"

Axl shrugged. "Maybe Steven was right and he was really trying to fly away." 

"Do you think he wanted to jump?" 

It hadn’t looked that way. As far as Slash had seen, Duff hadn’t made any moves to jump. He had rather looked like someone who was trying to get away from something, carefully checking out his way as he had moved over the roof. One of his demons probably. That was dangerous, but better than a suicide attempt

"Duff? No, I don't think so." Axl scratched his naked arms until his skin started to blister under his nails. "Duff's nuts, but he's never been suicidal. Not even when they brought him in, and he was really bad off then. Really, he was closer to an animal than a human being. They had drugged him until he could barely bring a spoon from his plate to his mouth. He was so confused he would get lost on the way from the dayroom to the toilet, and then you'd find him under the stairs or in a cupboard and he'd sputter all those stuff at you, about demons and how he really hadn't meant to do it."

"How long has he been here?" Slash asked. "I mean, he's much better, isn't he?" 

He watched Axl from his side of the room, how he pulled at his hair before he returned to scratching his arms. Axl was in a strangely open mood today. He wasn't just talking, he offered up information. Maybe he could get a bit more out of him before he returned to glossing over anything uncomfortable, and only droned on about his favourite topic: how mean the world was treating him. 

"Duff? I wouldn't say he's better. He's still talking nothing but bullshit, he's only less upset and that's why you don't notice so much. They brought him here about a year ago. No, I think it’s already two. Fuck, you lose all sense of time in here. Anyway. He was limping a bit, and they said he had broken his leg. But I overheard two of the doctors talking about him. I mean, yeah, he had a broken leg, but he had been shot and that had broken his leg."

"Shot!" Slash gasped. "Shot! But why? I mean who would shoot him?"

"There's this guy, Adam Henley, ever heard about him?"

Slash nodded. Henley had been some prominent TV preacher. He was the main face for a whole string of mega churches and it had made the big news when one day he had been found dead in his bedroom. He had suffered a heart-attack when he had confronted a burglar in his house. There had been a huge uproar in the media about it, an outcry for more security, harsher punishments, about drug crime and the general degenerateness of the youth. Slash couldn't say he had followed too closely.

"Yeah, anyway, that night when this guy died, you know, it was Duff who broke into his house." 

"He what…?" Slash stopped. "OK," he said then. 

This was Axl and he had been fooled into believing that Axl was behaving like a normal human being. He had sounded so sensible all day, almost amicable, but it had only been an illusion. He was still being Axl and what he was telling had been born in the recesses of a severely disturbed mind. Ten years within closed institutions, if Axl hadn't been mad before, he surely was by now. 

"Yeah. He set off the alarm when he was climbing down the balcony with his loot, and then the cops barged in, and shot him while he was trying to escape through the garden. At least that's the official version. Wanna hear my theory?"

"Sure," Slash said and wondered when they would let them out of their rooms. From what little he could see from their window, nobody had called the cops or an ambulance or given any other indication that Duff had fallen. Hopefully they had gotten to him in time. 

"He's a whore. I mean, come on. Nobody is that casual about sex. And he's awfully good at sucking dick. Good in a professional way I mean."

Slash wondered where Axl had gained his expertise to be a judge of a professionally or unprofessionally sucked dick, if he hadn't been out of mental institutions since the age of fourteen; but then, he was Axl and obviously blessed with a very vivid imagination. 

But it fit in with what Doc Johnson had said during his first therapy session, that Duff had been making his living on the streets of L.A. Slash had made a living on the streets of L.A. himself and he knew which abilities paid. Origami wasn’t one of them. Sucking dick might have just been the only way for Duff to make enough and survive. If he even knew how money worked. Most likely he had been palmed off with a sandwich and a candy bar. Slash felt his fury rise again at that thought. It was so easy to take advantage of Duff. 

"He didn't break into that house,” Axl kept spinning his tale. “He was there to do his job. And somehow this guy died and they tried to kill Duff so he wouldn't talk about it. I mean, church elder, raging homophobe. Dying from a heart-attack while having his dick sucked. By Duff of all people. I mean, think about it: Duff on T.V. with his big eyes and deranged mind, telling what he had been doing there.”

Slash could imagine it. People wouldn’t see him as the culprit, they would start a charity campaign. 

“Anyway, they didn't manage and now he's here, which is just as good as dead, 'cause whatever he might tell about it, nobody would believe him anyway."

"Sounds a bit insane, don't you think?" Slash asked and looked out of the window again. Still no sign that anything terrible had happened. 

"Yeah, I know." Axl grinned. "But believe it or not, I think the world out there is just as insane as the world in here. The only difference between us and them is that we have an official statement about it in our files."

Slash smiled a little. "You have a point there, man," he said. 

+++

They weren’t let out of their rooms again until dinner time, and for once Slash hurried to get to the dining room. Duff, however, was missing. 

He cornered Lucas, who looked tired and sweaty and was far from his usual jovial self. 

“Duff’s OK,” he said. “We’ve got him and he’s being checked over. Now, do me a favour.”

Slash nodded. 

“Just sit down, eat, and keep Axl with you for the rest of the day. Can you do that for me? We have enough of a situation here as it is. I don’t need Axl in the middle of it.”

It was a bit of a disappointment, but Slash nodded again. They wouldn’t get any more information, he knew. Gossip would eventually travel through the whole community, but it took a bit for the buzz to reach the dayroom. All they could do was wait until Duff came back, and maybe they could get a bit out of him. Although they probably needed Izzy for that. And Izzy wasn’t present either. 

Slash couldn’t stop looking towards the door, expecting to spot one of them any moment, but nothing happened. 

“I bet they gave him one of the pink ones,” Axl said suddenly. 

Slash turned his head and watched how Axl built mashed potato mountains in a lake of lumpy brown sauce. He was sure that this time the lack of appetite was not only a result of the disastrous food they were served. Something was missing when Duff wasn’t there. 

“Pink ones?” Slash ate a bite of overcooked beans and pulled a face in disgust. It wasn’t a miracle that most of the inmates looked skinny and underfed. One had to be starving to eat more than absolutely necessary. 

“Yep.” Axl moulded a canyon through one of the potato mountains and channelled a stream of sauce through it. “Nice stuff. Makes you forget what kind of shithole you’re living in. Fuck, makes you forget you’re living at all. Or that you’re you. And when you wake up, after a week or so, you’ve pissed your pants and drooled a map of the Great Lakes onto the pillow.”

It sounded not so different from some of the drug experiences he had undergone out of free will, Slash had to admit. 

“At least nothing’s happened to him,” he mumbled. “Do you think Izzy got a pink pill, too?”

“If he was lucky.” Axl smoothed the potato mountains out and buried them under a brown ocean. “But they know Izzy. And they’ll teach him a lesson. Means he’ll spend the night in the torture chamber.”

“Torture chamber?” Slash gave up all pretences of eating. Visions of hidden dungeons turned up before his inner eye, chains, barred cells and electroshocks. He shook his head to clear his mind. 

“Yeah.” Axl sat back and crossed his arms in front of his chest, refusing to eat one and for all “Officially they’re just single rooms. But they don’t have windows, and the one they like to stuff me into has nothing but a mattress on the floor. You don’t get a blanket either because you could choke yourself by eating it or some shit. So, you have a place where you can calm down without hurting yourself. At least that’s the theory. But funnily enough, they only ever put you in there when you’ve done something to annoy them. And I bet Izzy did annoy them. If there’s one thing they can’t stand it’s if you tell them to stuff it and dare making decisions on your own.”

That was a conclusion Slash had already drawn himself. Thinking for yourself was not encouraged at St. John’s. 

“They know Izzy is doing stuff behind their back, and that they only never manage to pin anything on him. So, whenever they catch him… once in a blue moon or so … they let him feel the full weight of their power. They won’t make it easy for him, so, no, I don’t think pink pill. I think isolation and restraints and staring at the ceiling. For days, if he really pissed them off."

Slash swallowed. It was a step up from electroshocks at least.


	5. Chicken Soup

When Izzy came to, he couldn’t move. At first, he panicked, but then he got his frazzled mind under enough control to find out the reason for his enforced immobility: full restraints. Fuck. He hadn’t been subjected to those in … well … ages. 

As soon as his vision cleared enough for an inspection of his surroundings, he tried to focus on one item after the other, naming them as he went: door, lamp, chair, drip. Shit, they were still adding chemicals to his bloodstream. Focussing his mind on his surroundings was a true and tried method to clear a drug haze, and after a while, he managed to force his brain into cooperation. 

He was in the basement, he realized, in one of their torture chambers, as Axl liked to call them. It wasn’t so far off. For a moment he was confused, not remembering what he might have done to justify punishment, but then it came back to him with full force. Duff. He was here because of Duff. Izzy took a deep breath and tried to not let his imagination run wild. Right now, there was nothing he could do. He had to wait until somebody bothered to tell him, which could take hours. Or longer, depending on how much he had annoyed them.

Axl was mainly familiar with the padded cell, where they would let him rage himself out every once in a while. Izzy knew that he himself would get a different kind of treatment. They would let him stew in his own juices for a while, mainly to show him that he was just a small, unimportant little piece in the great puzzle game that was St. John’s. If he refused to fit into the designated slot, then they would hammer him into form until he did.

He wondered what type of drug was running through the drip line into the back of his hand. Nothing too strong or he wouldn’t have woken up. It was still heavy enough to make him feel like being wrapped in cotton wool. It also kept him from getting his thoughts into order, when getting his thoughts into order was what he urgently needed to achieve. 

To make things even more difficult, his brain did him the favour to present him with another image of Duff falling off the roof. It came so sudden, that for a moment he was back outside. Before he knew what he was doing, he lost control and started to thrash. He caught himself within a second, though, and fought his way once more out of the cotton wool wrapper. Door, lamp, chair, drip line. Sadly there was nothing else in the room he could add to his recital. 

For now, it worked, but Izzy couldn’t say how long he would last. The constant feeling of dread in his chest flared up into panic mode every other minute, and it took him all he had to fight it back down to the dull presence he could halfway tolerate. 

Whenever he thought he had managed to keep his sanity intact despite being locked into a nuthouse, something like this would happen and throw him for a loop. He should never have allowed Duff to worm himself under his defences the way he had. 

Yeah, tough shit, now it was too late. Duff was his responsibility, and he took care of what was his, and that right now he was unable to, was more than he could handle. He seriously thought about saying good-bye to self-control, and just starting to scream, when finally, finally, the door opened. Lucas, he noticed to his relief, already in street clothes and ready to go home. 

“Feeling better?” he asked instead of a greeting. Normally they got along well, but today Lucas’ face was devoid of his usual good humour. “That was some serious blunder, Izzy, but I suppose, you know that.”

“Duff?” Izzy asked. 

Lucas pulled a chair towards the bed. “All safe and sound.”

Izzy let a breath go he hadn’t even been aware he had been holding. 

“Where is he?”

“Izzy,” Lucas said. “How about we talk about you for a few minutes.”

“Where’s Duff?” Izzy snapped. So they had gotten him off the roof and now? What state was he in? Why had he done it in the first place? Who was dealing with him? Where would he sleep? Alone? That was not a good idea.

“Getting some time to calm down. Just like you.” 

“Fuck, you can’t tie him up!” For a moment Izzy forgot that he couldn’t sit up and tried anyway. The sudden pull from the restraints sent him into a surge of panic. His befuddled mind, in its current state unable to properly deal with the mixture of fury and worry anyway, decided it was a good idea to switch off its rational part and fully move into fight or flight mode. 

“Calm down. Izzy!” 

Somebody grabbed his head from behind, one hand under his chin and one over his forehead, pushing it backwards and holding him in an iron grip. 

“Calm down. Come on, Izzy, deep breaths. You can do it. I know you don’t want me to get the doc, so work with me here.”

That threat was enough to make Izzy snap back into reality. He compelled his body to just lie still and unmoving, no matter that he almost exploded from the inside. Lucas’ grip eased off a bit, but he didn’t fully let go. Izzys’s muscles were almost cramping from the strain it took to keep his limbs from thrashing, but he managed. 

“That’s it,” Lucas said soothingly, running a hand over Izzy’s forehead. “You’re doing good. No need to panic. Just let go.” 

Letting go was far from Izzy’s intentions, but he managed enough of a resemblance of calmness that Lucas eventually released him and returned to his chair. 

Izzy huffed out a couple of breaths and Lucas held a bottle with a straw to his mouth. 

“It’s just water,” he said when Izzy eyed it suspiciously. 

Not that they had to trick him into swallowing anything, for the next time he would get his chemical enhancers intravenously. His mouth was drier than the desert, and so he took a few sips. Lucas put the bottle back and watched him with a mixture of disapproval and compassion. 

“You know, man, with all due respect to your protectiveness, but… there is a line between protective and possessive, and to say you've been toeing that line lately, would be an understatement. Duff is not your responsibility. He’s ours. And you have to trust that we are able to take care of him. You’re here to get better yourself, not work yourself up into a frenzy about Duff. How about you focus on that for a change?”

Izzy glared at him, but they had played this game countless times, and as usual, Lucas was unimpressed. 

“You were doing so much better. No more fights with other patients, you socialize more, you even smile now and then. And I heard you laugh the other day. I think it was the first time since you came here. Really, Izzy, you’re on a good way. Don’t spoil it. Would be a shame. I’m still hoping to see you walk out of here before my retirement.”

Izzy could have told him that he simply had no reason to beat up people anymore, now that he had established the new world order at St. John’s. There had been a few incidents before he had settled all disputes about who would and who wouldn’t get access to Duff’s more specialized talents, but once that had been clarified, there hadn’t been any need for fighting. 

He wasn’t like Axl, who just fought for the heck of it. If he did, he had a reason. And that reason was now tied to some bed somewhere and was probably out of his mind with fear. 

And socializing? So what if he was tolerating Slash and Axl around himself and Duff? If that was socializing, yeah, then he was socializing. But he definitely wasn’t smiling. Never. That must have happened in Lucas’ fantasy. 

Lucas stood up. “I’ll check on Duff before I go home and I’ll come back for you two first thing in the morning. You’re my favourite two patients after all.” He said it as a joke, but Izzy was sure, at least in Duff’s case, it was true. “Try to get some rest, OK? If I come in tomorrow morning to hear that you have made it difficult for the nightshift, I’d be very disappointed.”

He patted his shoulder as good-bye, and then Izzy was left alone. Somebody came in to check on him now and then, twice something else was added to his drip line, but apart from that, nobody cared about him, nobody talked to him and he was smart enough to not ask after Duff. He did sleep eventually, then woke up again, and realized that he wouldn’t be let go anytime soon. 

Lucas showed his face once more, indicating that it was morning, told him that Duff had had a good night and was now up and running. It could just as well have been a lie. And even if it was true, it wasn’t comforting either. Izzy’s head was slowly getting clearer, and contrary to the mindless worrying from the evening before, he was now able to analyse the situation. What the hell had Duff been doing up on the roof? He wasn’t one to pull shit like that. If he got scared, he hid in the broom closet. 

The hours crept on slowly. Somebody came to feed him, but Izzy wasn’t hungry. When he refused to eat – not even because he was trying to be difficult, but just because the idea of food was revolting in itself – he was fitted with a nasogastric tube. As if he was on a hunger strike or might die from starvation within the next 24 hours. Fuck, even a glucose drip would have tied him over just fine, if they were worried about his blood sugar. 

But this wasn’t about medical needs, this was a taste of what he could expect in the future. His leash had just been considerably shortened. If he didn’t comply, even with unimportant things like eating breakfast, he would feel the consequences. 

And it worked. Izzy started to worry about how long they would keep him like this. It wasn’t his first stint in the torture chamber, but usually they had let him out after a night of ruminating about his wrongdoings. This was different and he realized belatedly, that he had made a colossal mistake. So far, he had only ever gotten into disputes with other inmates. This time he had gotten in a row with the staff and that couldn’t be tolerated. 

He couldn't say what was worse, the inability to move or the fact that nobody told him anything, not what they were planning for him, not what was going on outside, nothing. Every now and then somebody would come and take care of his most basic needs, but that was all. He was left alone to stare at the walls and wonder how to get the cramps out of his back. It was amazing how painful lying flat could be after a while. 

He had no idea what the time was, when suddenly the door opened once again. He hoped for Lucas, because he was the only one who would give him illegal updates, but instead it was Duff himself. 

“Hi, Izzy,” he said and closed the door behind himself. “You weren’t there for dinner.”

“No,” Izzy replied. He couldn’t help the smile that spread over his face. Duff looked, if not good, then at least normal. Maybe a bit more troubled than was his default mode, but definitely not disturbed or even in panic. 

Duff came over and sat down on the corner of the bed. 

“You weren’t there last night either,” he said. 

“No. Did something happen last night?”

“Just that you weren’t there. Are you very sick?”

“I’m not sick,” Izzy replied. He flexed his fingers. Duff understood and slipped his own between them. “I’ll be back in … yeah, hopefully a day or two.”

“I wanted to bring you chicken soup. Because you’re sick, you know. But Samantha said no. I explained to her that sick people need chicken soup, but she wouldn’t budge.” Duff stroked his fingers, now and then brushing against the needle in the back of his hand. “I don’t think they should stick things into you,” he said. “Chicken soup would be better.” 

Izzy wholeheartedly agreed. "I’m not sick, so don’t worry.”

“That’s good. They wouldn’t let me out to get you some flowers either. I mean, when you’re sick, people bring you flowers, right?”

Izzy laughed. The idea of Duff barging in with flowers and chicken soup was hilarious. 

“For how long will you be sick?”

“I’m not sick,” Izzy repeated. He knew it was pointless. Maybe it was better if Duff though he was down here because he was sick, and not because he was being punished. Punishment was a concept Duff was unable to grasp. 

“I brought you this instead.” He crammed through his pockets and pulled out two slightly mangled M&Ms. “You can have them.”

“They are red ones,” Izzy said. Duff was extremely fond of the red ones. He always kept them until the very end before eating them. 

“They’re the best,” Duff replied. “So I saved them for you.”

“Who gave you M&Ms?” Izzy asked while Duff held one against his lips. He would have preferred a cigarette, but if Duff offered him M&Ms – red ones -, then it would be impolite to not eat them. Swallowing would be a bit of a nuisance around the tube, but maybe they would take the blasted thing out if he suffocated on M&Ms. “Did you get your allowance today?”

Even if Duff got his allowance, he didn’t know what to do with it. Duff had no grasp on money, and that one had to hand it over to get something in return. He usually folded the bills into little animals, until Izzy managed to pry them out of his hands and use them to pay the kitchen help. 

“I won’t get my allowance this month because ….” He frowned. “Thomas said something. I’ve forgotten. Everybody else got it today. I’m not sure why I’m not getting mine. Thomas said something about …” He broke off. 

No, Duff didn’t understand punishment. He never would, no matter how often they docked his allowance or assigned some shit job to him or told him he wouldn’t have dessert. It was not how Duff operated, so it was beyond Izzy why they kept trying nevertheless. 

“Then how did you get chocolate?” Izzy asked again. 

“Slash.” Duff beamed. “He got them for me. Although it’s not shopping day, but Lucas said he’d make an exception. Anyway, I saved the red ones for you. There were only two in the bag,” he added apologetically.

Izzy raised his eyebrows. 

Shopping day was once per month, when they were allowed to blow their pocket money on awesome things like candy in overpriced, tiny packages, or wax crayons or birthday cards or other inane bullshit. It wasn’t even enough money to get into a decent sugar hype, but they still liked to make a huge brouhaha about their generosity. After all, they were not working, they were receiving therapy. Paying them, even those meagre few dollars, was absolutely optional. 

“Did Slash ask you to do something for it? Suck his dick, for example?” he asked. Here he was out of commission for one single day and Slash was putting the moves on Duff? He couldn’t believe it. 

Duff shook his head. “He said I shouldn’t be sad and you would be back soon. He didn’t know that you were sick. I tried to explain it to him and that chicken soup would be better than M&Ms, but I don’t think he understood.”

“I’m not sick.” Izzy was only halfway reassured. It could be the first step towards more. Or he was just being paranoid. According to Dr Chau he was suffering from severe and persistent paranoia, and he urgently needed to work on it. No joke there, paranoia was what had kept him alive, first in prison and now here, and he refused to give up on it. 

Sadly, he still needed Slash because being out of commission brought him right to the next problem. 

“Look, Duff,” he said, hoping he was able to get through. “You have to stop sneaking through the house.”

“I’m not sneaking.” Duff looked offended. 

Izzy chuckled. “Yes, you are. And normally I wouldn’t mind, but something is not right, and I don’t want you to be alone, Ok?”

“I don’t want to be alone either, but you were not there last night. So I still was.”

The nights were unfortunately something Izzy couldn’t find a solution for, even if they were the most pressing issue. But at least the doors were locked at night and Duff wouldn’t be able to climb onto roofs. 

“What were you doing on the roof?”

“Which roof?” Duff asked. 

“The one you were sitting on yesterday.” Or was it already the day before yesterday? This shit was fucking with his cognitive functions like nothing else. 

“I don’t know what you mean.” Duff looked into space, indicating the discussion was over.

Sometimes he wondered if Duff really didn’t know what he was talking about. He was not naturally sneaky, but every now and then Izzy got the feeling, that Duff played the vacant-card with too much skill. 

“I want you to stick to Slash,” he said instead of pressing the issue. He would eventually get out of Duff what he had been doing on the roof, but it took more time than he had. “Go where he goes. No matter where. Just stay close. Can you promise that?”

Duff shrugged. “Can’t I stay here instead?”

“Probably not,” Izzy replied. “Promise?”

Clearly unhappy, Duff nodded. 

“Good. If he complains, tell him I said so. And that I’ll get him cigarettes when I’m back, OK?”

Slash wouldn’t get them for free, of course, but they would have to reschedule the price negotiations. Izzy wouldn’t get his allowance this month either, or ever again, if he had truly pissed off the powers that were, which meant he would have to do a bit of dealing with cigarettes on the side anyway. But Slash would be happy to get some at all, and hopefully he would pay a bit above market value. 

Duff nodded again. “Do you want another M&M?” He looked with longing at the red abomination in his hand, but offered it up heroically. 

“Eat it yourself,” Izzy said when it was pressed against his lips. 

Duff hesitated, but shook his head. “I don’t have chicken soup and you’re sick. The red ones are the best,” he added, like a mother coaxing her toddler into eating. 

Izzy caved in and ate another M&M. Hopefully the last one because swallowing was really not pleasant with that thing down his throat. In addition, this one tasted slightly dusty, as if it had been rolling around in a place food was not supposed to be rolling around in. 

“You have to go, Duff,” he said. It was not a good idea if he was found here, not when the atmosphere was as tense as it was. “Stick with Slash. Promise.”

Duff nodded. “I’ll bring you chicken soup next time. And flowers. Because you’re sick.”

“I’m not sick. And now go!” 

To his relief, Duff obeyed, if not without bending forward and kissing him onto his mouth. Surprised, Izzy licked his lips. Duff didn’t know what the word discretion meant, and so, right from the beginning, Izzy had made it clear that he was not allowed to initiate anything more than a quick hug. He felt like an asshole for it sometimes, but he couldn’t have Duff walk up to him and kiss him in the middle of the dayroom. 

Hopefully he would really stick with Slash. And hopefully Slash would get why Izzy insisted on constant observation and showed some commitment to his new obligations. And hopefully, hopefully he would be out of here at the latest tomorrow.


	6. Anger Management

Slash and Axl were in the day room after dinner, drinking chamomile tea from plastic cups, when Duff joined them again. He had seemed happy about the M&Ms Slash had wheedled out of Lucas (‘not that he deserves them after that stunt, this stays between us, make sure he doesn’t eat them all at once’), but now he looked troubled again. 

“Izzy is still sick,” he said and sat down on the couch next to Axl. “He says I have to stick to you until he’s better.”

“He said …?” Axl asked. “You went downstairs?”

Duff nodded. 

“Wow.” Axl looked impressed and Axl was never impressed by Duff. “I knew you were good at sneaking around, but … wow.”

“I’m not sneaking around. I wanted to bring him chicken soup, but Samantha said ‘no’. I don’t know why. I always get chicken soup when I’m sick.”

“Really?” Axl asked. “I never get chicken soup.”

Duff looked confused for a moment, but then he nodded vigorously. 

“Yes, chicken soup,” he repeated. “All the time. When somebody is sick. I’m sure of it. And flowers. You get flowers when you’re sick.”

“Nobody gets you flowers.” Axl was back to nagging. “They tell you to suck it up and stop being an annoying brat about a trifle.”

“How’s Izzy doing?” Slash asked, both, because he didn’t want to talk about chicken soup anymore, and because he was not sure how to find out what kind of horrors where really happening ‘downstairs’. 

“He’s sick. He’ll give you cigarettes.”

Slash perked up. “He will? Why?”

“In case you’ll complain.”

“Oh, I’m complaining like woah!” Slash said. “Complain about what?”

“No idea. But he said I have to go where you go and stay where you stay and … other things. I can’t remember. He said a lot. Really a lot.” Duff sighed.

Slash cast Axl a puzzled look. “Is that normal? Would Izzy say stuff like that?”

“No. But you don’t know what they’re shooting into him. He might just be completely off his rockers.” Axl gave Duff a curious look. “Why were you on the roof, Duff?” 

They had asked that question about a dozen times already, but the only replies they ever got were vacant stares into outer space. This time was no different. Duff stopped looking at them. Instead he picked up one of the magazines and separated the pages from each other. It was a fairly new one, with glossy paper and a photo of some supermodel on the cover. Somebody would have a fit that it had already fallen to Duff’s rising need for craft material. Not that Duff cared. He sorted the pages by colour and started to fold them into origami flowers. 

Slash puzzled over the newest development for a while. So Izzy wanted him to keep an eye on Duff. He could do that, cigarettes or not, but the question remained, why? Surely, they would supervise him enough to make sure he wouldn’t climb on roofs anymore, wouldn’t they? Maybe it was just Izzy’s usual brand of Duff related craziness. He did go over the top there sometimes. 

His musings were interrupted when Lucas approached them. 

“Axl, you’re moving,” he said without preamble. 

Axl blanched, then turned an unhealthy-looking shade of red, and Slash knew they were in for an outburst. 

“Fuck you, no, I’m not!” he yelled. 

He jumped up and threw one of Duff’s flowers into Lucas’ direction. It wasn’t very effective, and so he looked around for something heavier. Slash watched in fascination, as Axl picked up first his own mug, then Slash’s and flung them both onto the floor. They were made of plastic and didn’t shatter, but tea spilled everywhere, over the floor, the chairs and also some pant legs. Immediately, the familiar hooting and screaming started all around them. 

Lucas didn’t even twitch. “You’ll clean that up,” he said calmly. Everybody was used to Axl throwing stuff, it didn’t warrant any special indignation anymore. 

“I’m not a fucking piece of furniture!” Axl yelled. “You can’t ship me from one loony bin to another, you can’t fucking…”

“Relax, you’re not leaving the house.”

“I’m not?” For a moment Axl looked speechless. “Fuck you,” he yelled then. “What is this shit with moving then, huh? I’m still not going anywhere, I’m staying right where I am, I …”

“You’re moving in with Izzy.” Lucas said, unimpressed. “And Duff is moving in with Slash.”

“Why?” Slash asked. 

He wasn’t sure whether he liked the idea or not. Sure, Axl was difficult, but he was also entertaining and a never-ending source of gossip. Duff, on the other hand, was nice and cute and friendly, but never made any sense, and had these ominous blackouts. Slash wasn’t sure how to handle it should the devil visit him at night. Not the way Izzy handled him. Izzy would be angry if Duff wasn’t handled properly, and Izzy being cross with him was still a scary thought. 

Suddenly the chainsaw appeared before his inner eye, the motor roaring in swelling and fading cadences. He had almost forgotten about it over the last weeks. Yes, they were getting along lately, but Duff was the one issue where Izzy didn’t take prisoners.

“Because the doc says so,” Lucas replied. “Tomorrow afternoon. Start packing your things.”

“The hell I’ll do!” Axl yelled. “Fuck you, you can pack it yourself.”

Lucas he was about as fazed by Axl’s anger as a sturdy oak tree by a light summer breeze. “You know where you find the mop, Axl.” He grinned and winked and left them to themselves. 

“I told you they would make Izzy pay,” Axl growled when they were on their own again. “And now you are the one who gets all the blow jobs. Lucky bastard. And I get to move in with Izzy of all people.”

He looked genuinely scared, Slash noticed. Maybe Izzy was Axl’s version of Duff’s devil. 

+++

After another night of backpain and utter boredom, Izzy was released. Lucas came to get him and to his embarrassment, he needed help to get onto his feet. His whole body was stiff and cramping and it took him several steps to gain his bearing. It didn’t help that he was still drugged out of his mind. Balance definitely refused to come easy to him that morning. 

Of course, they wouldn’t just let him go back to the daily routine, no, Izzy was due for an extra session with his personal inquisitor. He had expected as much and so he wasn’t surprised when they ended in front of one of the therapy rooms. Dr Chau would have a field day with the current development. All his worries and suspicions confirmed on just one single day. 

Izzy entered, sat down, and stared at the wall. He wasn't willing, wasn't ready and yet he knew there was no way to avoid it. They wouldn't let him. There were two rules that applied to his life as it was: when told to swallow he swallowed and when told to talk he talked. The rest was meaningless. 

"Are you feeling better?" Chau asked, the typical pretence of understanding on his face.

Maybe he did understand, but Izzy wasn't so sure. He didn't trust any of them, not Johnson, not Hopton and not Chau, no matter how much he worked the fatherly line. They held the power and it was always a mistake to trust those who made the decisions. It was a game, a game about figuring out what they wanted and giving it to them, a game he had not only to play for himself, but also for Duff, but if Duff started pulling stunts like that one, that game would soon develop a totally new twist. Trust Duff to keep life exciting. 

"I'm OK," he said after about an eternity. 

It wasn't true, for the question wasn't about 'feeling better'. How was anybody able to 'feel better' when their blood was swamped with drugs the way his own currently was? He was calm, yes, or rather numb and indifferent, not really caring about what was about to happen next, but 'better' was not the word he would use to describe his current state of mind. 

The question was really about whether he would go on another rampage any time soon, whether he would threat another set of doctors and orderlies with ripping their heads off, and the honest answer would be that, yes, the next time Duff sat on a roof he would do exactly the same thing again. 

Chau rubbed the bridge of his nose in his cumbersome 'I care for you, but why do you make it so difficult for me' way that drove Izzy up the walls each time he saw it. He had no reason to complain though, not compared to Duff who was an exclusive victim of Hopton and his archaic methods, and who crawled into a dark corner to hide after each of his sessions. Whatever methods Hopton applied to make Duff talk about his past, obviously didn't appeal to him. 

"I think we should work some more on your anger-management," Chau said and Izzy rolled his eyes. 

"This has nothing to do with anger-management," he said. "Duff was balancing over a roof and, sorry, but out of all the people in this fucking madhouse I had the best chance at getting him down." Izzy bit his lip. 

That was another drawback of being drugged. He tended to say what he thought, and his line of thinking was not popular at St. John’s. How many times had he been sitting in this room, Chau in the armchair across from the couch, pretending to feel what they wanted him to feel and trying to say what they wanted to hear? And hadn’t he prided himself on getting really good at it? And now he snarled at Chau just as he had done during the first weeks. 

"And you were willing to kill somebody because you were afraid for Duff? Because nobody could help him but you? You were the only person able to achieve that?"

Izzy frowned. "I only said that. That I’d kill somebody. I didn't mean it." 

"Are you sure?"

He looked away. There they were again, and nothing he could say would change Chau's opinion about him. 

"The situation was different," he said. It had been.

"Are you sure?"

Izzy nodded. 

"So, what made it different this time?"

Izzy hesitated, but he had fucked up his position for at least the next five years anyway. 

"Look," he snapped, "what do you want me to say? Is there anything I could tell you to change your mind? I killed a man. I regret that. I do. More than you can think. But I don't go out on a killing spree once a month, no matter what you think. And that's all I'm going to say about this.”

He crossed his arms in front of his chest and stared out of the window. Fuck, now he was behaving like a sulking child. Worse, he was behaving like Axl. If he were clearheaded, he might be able to play this game to Chau’s satisfaction, but hazy as he was? No chance. Being stubborn was not ideal, but it was better than blundering his way through the session. 

"What if you had had a gun?" Chau asked, unfazed by his reaction. 

That was the most annoying thing about all of them, one could rant and rave or even throw stuff, and they still remained cool and indifferent. Everything just bounced back and pushing them never led to any sort of satisfaction. 

Izzy didn't answer. He had said all there was to say. 

"What were you feeling? Duff was in danger and people were trying to keep you from helping him, when you thought you were the only person able to do that. How did that make you feel?"

Izzy just stared. Furious? Destructive? Helpless? What did the bastard want to hear?

"Was it comparable to the last time? When you thought your wife was in danger?" 

"I have nothing to say," he forced out through clenched teeth. 

She had been cheating on him. The marriage hadn't been the best to begin with, started because she had been pregnant and kept out of a feeling of obligation. She had been depressed after the baby had been stillborn and getting a divorce had seemed cruel. Izzy had been understanding, but he was not the compassionate type. He wasn’t one to talk about feelings and he hadn’t known how to help her. Maybe he hadn’t cared enough to make an effort either. Whatever her reasons, he had never blamed her for looking elsewhere. 

He had come home from a hunting trip. Those hunting trips had gotten more and more frequent, really just an excuse to leave the house for a weekend, than a real endeavour to kill deer. More often than not it had just been about getting drunk in the cabin, and he hadn’t even bothered to look for something to shoot. 

He had returned a day earlier than planned, because the weather had been disastrous, and had just stumbled in on them. He hadn't known, neither that she had had a lover nor that she had rather fancy ideas about sex. Between them it had all been plain vanilla and in the end not even that often anymore. 

When he had stepped into the kitchen to see his wife bowed over the table, naked, hands tied behind her back and a gag in her mouth while a total stranger was fucking her, grunting out phrases like 'You dirty, little bitch, I'll give it to you,' he hadn't thought twice; or maybe he hadn't even thought once. And he hadn’t been completely sober either. The rifle had still been in his hands and he had used it. 

It hadn't come as a surprise that nobody had believed his story. He had been pinned with a crime committed out of jealousy, when in fact he would have signed any divorce papers with a flourish, if she only had asked.

He had gone to jail first, but it was amazing what a clever lawyer could achieve. Only Izzy wasn't so sure anymore that it had been a good deal. Maybe prison was less comfortable than this place, but there was a determined time to serve before he could go home. A very long time, yes, but eventually it would come to an end. Here, they could keep him for as long as they deemed necessary, even if it was for the rest of his life, and he more and more got the feeling that he was heading that way. 

The original idea had been a bit different. He would show them that he was a responsible citizen, that he had just been seized by a bout of mental derangement, caused by the severe stress of the situation, a one-time-mistake that would never ever repeat itself, and that it would shorten his sentence to … ten years maybe. But then Duff had been there and now they seemed to think he was sliding right into another episode of deranged overprotectiveness. Ten years, his ass. He and Axl would eventually roll their wheeled walkers next to each other through the vegetable garden. 

“Izzy?” Dr Chau prompted and Izzy realized that he had been drifting off. “I have asked you a question. Were your feelings comparable to last time?”

Yeah, they had been. Only ten times worse. Still, he wouldn’t just do it again. Next time he would hit the guy in question over the head and demand some explanations before killing him. He surely wouldn't hesitate to hit Hopton over the head to keep him away from Duff. 

"Izzy!" 

He was torn out of his musings and looked up to where Chau was sitting in front of him, parental worry all over his face. 

“This is the root of the problem again. In the end it always leads back to the same issue: you don’t trust anybody. You only ever expect the worst. After all your time here, you are still unable to put an ounce of trust into any of us, when all we are trying to do is to help you."

Yeah, shit, they had just left him tied to a bed for two days, what did they expect? Eternal gratefullness? 

“You don’t accept help. You refuse to work on your problems. And whenever it seems as if you’re finally making some progress, your paranoia flares up, and we’re back to step one. How often do you want to play this game?”

Izzy kept his mouth shut. If he opened it, if only to take a deep breath, he would say something that would cost him later. He started to check the room out for things he could name. Lamp, armchair, annoying shrink, couch, bookshelf. 

“See? Just what I mean. How often have we wasted both our time here because you refused to say a word? You have to learn to control your emotions, Izzy, and the first step in that direction is to open up about them. Acknowledge what you’re feeling.”

If he acknowledged what he was feeling at this exact moment, it would slap at least another five years onto his case, Izzy thought. Sometimes he felt the deep need to just stand up in the middle of group therapy and tell them how he fantasized about picking up a flame thrower and burn down the entire place. It would only confirm what everybody was thinking anyway, so might not even damage his prospects all that much. Maybe they would even be delighted that he was finally ‘opening up’. 

“I'm sure you don't want to stay here forever, but if you don't accept how you feel, then you don't have the power to control your feelings either. Right now, your emotions are controlling you and for as long as that is the case, there is always the risk of another … accident happening."

Izzy looked away. Of course, he wanted to leave as soon as possible. It had been his one goal right from the beginning, to do what they told him, to say what they wanted to hear, to convince them that it had been a one-time error that would never repeat itself. Then he would leave and go home. No not home, not to that bumfuck town he had spent his life in, but someplace else, where nobody knew him and where he could start new. To Mexico or New Zealand or even Greenland if it was necessary. Just away from all of them. 

Only he would never manage to convince Hopton that he was able to care for Duff, and that it wasn't necessary to keep him locked up and to feed him with pills and therapy until it was coming right out of his ears. All Duff needed was somebody who had an eye on him. And lately somebody who kept him from climbing onto rooftops, but that could be solved by only living in bungalows. 

No, if he left St. John's, be it in ten or in fifty years, he would have to leave Duff behind.

“So,” Chau stood up, indicating their little talk was over and that he was very disappointed. 

Why they all kept thinking that Izzy gave a flying fuck about anybody being disappointed in him, remained another mystery. He hadn’t even cared when his own parents had let him feel their disappointment, it would hardly scratch at his conscience that some stranger should disapprove of his conduct.

“I think we will have to change things up a bit.”

Izzy braced himself. They couldn’t transfer him to another ward, the security regulations wouldn’t allow it, but Duff was another case. If he managed in his stupidity to get Duff sent away, they might really have to bring out the straightjacket. 

“Leo said you had a green thumb.”

“Ehm, what?” Izzy was thrown for a loop. What had the fucking gardening to do with it?

“He said you were doing a very good job.” It was almost said kindly. 

“Uhm. I guess,” Izzy stuttered. “When you’re born in the sticks, you kind of … grow up with that.” Really, everybody had a garden where he was coming from. All children complained about having to help, and during the summer all kids earned some extra cash by helping out elderly neighbours with their garden chores. It was like cheering somebody on for being able to wipe their ass. 

“Right.” Chau, however, seemed happy about it. “Apart from adjusting your medication…”

‘Of course,’ Izzy thought sarcastically. His days of thinking clearly were once more over. 

“… I think we will assign you a bit more responsibility. You also need to have more social interactions with people who are … not Duff. This … co-dependency is not helpful for either of you.”

Izzy held his breath. Here they were going again. Maybe they would make him live in the garden shed from now on. It would be an improvement. 

“I have talked to my colleagues and we agree that it might be worth a try. As long as this … project does not unduly inconvenience the other patients.” Chau gave him a long, hard look, one that made sure Izzy knew that if he inconvenienced anybody, there would be hell to pay. “You will from now on be responsible for the plot your group has been working on.”

“And that means … what?” Izzy asked, still not sure this was all one big joke. 

“You decide what is planted, where it is planted, you make sure your team is instructed and knows what they are doing.”

Izzy was pretty sure his mouth was hanging open. In a second, he would start to drool. Who was the crazy person in this room? Not him, that just became clear. 

“As team leader, you will also be responsible for the outcome.”

“Ehm… nobody there knows what they are doing,” he said. OK, that was unfair, there was this guy named Paul, who was not completely incompetent. But he only had to think about Slash and Slash wasn’t even the worst of the bunch. Just the most entertaining one, when he was sitting there in the dirt, his curls hanging over his face, and trying to figure out which end of a plant needed sun and which one got into the earth. 

“Then make sure they learn. Teach them.”

Oh. Right. So that was the crux of the matter. He would have to deal one on one with every single moron in their freaking gardening group. Social interaction galore. Having a tube stuffed down his throat while being tied to a bed sounded like heaven compared to that. 

“I can plant whatever I want?” he asked, suddenly getting an idea. If he had to do this shit, maybe he could reap some benefits. He wondered what the kitchen help would be able to deliver, given the right incentive. And he had to get Slash onboard to fund the project. Slash would probably be enthusiastic enough to actually learn how to distinguish roots from leaves. 

“Within reasons,” Chau said. “Run your plans past Leo.”

“OK.” Izzy stood up. “So, we’re done here?”

“Yes.” Chau forced a smile. “Oh, and Izzy,” he added when Izzy was already halfway out of the door. “Everybody here knows how Marihuana plants look. So, don’t even try.”


	7. Treasure Island

A couple of hours later, Izzy sat on his bed, eyes closed, head leaning against the wall, and tried to ignore the mutterings Axl trotted out while making his bed and putting his clothes into the wardrobe. He was in one hell of a mood, but couldn’t afford to let any of that show. Giving them the satisfaction to put him right back where he had just come from, was out of the question. If he was honest, he wasn’t sure that he would be able to take it either. 

To make things worse, he was coming down with something. Right after he had left Chau to his crazy ideas, the sniffling had started, and within hours he had developed the full package: sore throat, stuffed nose, headache from hell. 

Then he had learned that they were moving Duff out. No surprise there, but that they were moving Axl in instead had come as a shock. He could tolerate Axl maybe for an hour now and then, but fulltime? Why were they doing it? So, he could prove he had his emotions under control and didn’t spontaneously kill annoying people? 

Were they even aware that they were toying with Axl’s life? Oh, maybe that was the reason behind it all, two birds with one stone: Axl would be dead, and Izzy would have shown once again that he was a menace to society and better off in a straightjacket. 

“Stop complaining,” he growled eventually, “I’m not pleased with this arrangement either.”

For a second there was silence, then the noises of lifting the mattress to put on new sheets restarted, but apart from that Axl had truly shut up. 

“What the fuck is this?” he said all of a sudden. 

Izzy opened his eyes and cast a curious glance into Axl’s direction. 

“What? Did you find some leftover M&Ms? Duff likes to hide them under his mattress.”

“Duff likes to hide a lot of stuff under the mattress,” Axl said. “What is all this shit?”

“He will want it back,” Izzy said and closed his eyes again, trying to will the headache away. Wasn’t his mind befuddled enough as it was? How was he supposed to grasp one clear thought like this? “Take care you don’t lose anything of it, he’ll notice.”

“He’ll notice? How? Does he keep a list somewhere?” 

Izzy stifled a grin. There was a whole conglomeration of useless shit under Duff’s bed, not only candy, but little bits and pieces he had stolen all over the institution. Nothing of higher value, just things like tea spoons, ball pens, empty pill blisters, stuff people threw away or left lying around. Izzy had convinced Lucas to turn a blind eye on it, and as cleaning their rooms was part of the therapy, nobody else had noticed so far. But Duff would be very unhappy if Axl threw his possessions away. There was after all not much he could call his property. 

„I didn’t know Duff had a bank safe,” Axl said after some more rummaging through the little pile of trash. 

Izzy reopened his eyes. “A bank safe. I doubt he even has an account.”

“Yep.” Axl held up a key. “What’s he keeping in there? The family jewels?”

“A bank safe?” He stretched his hand out and Axl handed him the key. It was small and didn’t look very specific. “This could be anything, doesn’t have to be a bank safe.” Izzy turned it around and saw 3375 etched in tiny numbers into the head. “Or maybe it is.” He straightened up. “Maybe one of the doctors let it lie around?”

“I didn’t know Duff was a thief,” Axl said. He looked strangely delighted about the observance. 

“I prefer the word ‘collector’.” Izzy was still staring at the key. “You sure this belongs to a bank safe?”

“Pretty much. My parents had one. I once nicked the key because I thought maybe they were filthy rich or had dirty secrets, but I didn’t get into the vault. So I still don’t know what’s in there. Probably the policy for the fire insurance or the birth certificates or some such shit. 

Izzy closed his fist around the key and lay back on the bed. 

“Hey, I found the key. It’s mine, give it back,” Axl complained. 

“It’s Duff’s, so shut up” 

Why would Duff need a bank safe? Sure, he might have stolen the key from one of the doctors, but there was also the possibility that it truly belonged to him. Maybe, just like the bank safe of Axl’s parents, it contained information about Duff’s origin. Izzy wasn’t even sure he wanted to know. As things were now, Duff was more or less his, and he wasn’t keen on distant family showing up and laying claims to him. There was after all a slight chance that he still had relatives who would care if they knew where he was; or that he existed at all. Duff’s origin was one of the big, unsolved mysteries of the planet. 

“You know,” Axl suddenly said, “if Duff has really nicked it from one of the doctors, there might be something really, really compromising in it. Sex photos with gay street boys for example. We could blackmail them into letting us do … fuck, no idea. Fuck, I don’t even know anymore what I would like to do if I only could. How sad is that, huh?”

Izzy closed his hand more firmly around the key, trying to block out Axl’s drivel. 

Gay street boys. 

It wasn’t a big secret that Duff had been whoring around before he had been picked up by the police. 

“Somebody might pay a shitload of money for whatever is in the safe,” Axl prattled on. “Or kill us, if they find out we’ve got it, who knows.”

Izzy sat up and wiped his running nose on his sleeve. “What did you just say?”

“I said it might belong to the mafia and hold information about their contract killers or potential victims, or…”

“No, you said they might kill us if they find out that we’ve got it.”

“Yeah, sure. You know how the mafia is.”

Izzy closed his eyes and almost felt the scars of Duff’s bullet wounds under his fingers. Where ever Duff had gotten that key, he was not supposed to have it. He fished his shoes out from under the bed and stood up. 

“Where’re you going?” Axl asked. 

“Not your business.”

“Oh no, I found the key.” Axl followed him out of the room. “You’re gonna ask Duff about it, right?”

“Not your business,” Izzy repeated while he looked around for tissues, blew his nose and stuffed his pockets full of extras. 

“Fuck you, I’ve got every right in the world to know. Without me it would still be buried under a pile of trash.”

Nobody with a cold like his should be forced to deal with Axl. Izzy was sure there was something in the Geneva Convention about it. He was about to give the proper retort, but at exactly that moment he saw Thomas coming down the corridor. The last thing he needed was Axl getting into a fit of rage over the key and making it public all over the hospital. 

“OK, then come on,” he said. “But I’m asking the questions. You’re keeping your mouth shut. You know how Duff is, he’ll log out if you push too hard. One word and I’ll beat your ass right into next year.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Axl replied, but he looked content enough. “I bet he’s in the day room, destroying magazines.”

Just as Axl had predicted, they found Duff surrounded by paper. Slash sat across from him, watching how he folded colourful magazine pages into six cornered Christmas stars. Life had to be truly interesting if watching Duff’s craft projects was the highlight of the day. 

The room was almost empty, only the regular catatonics cowered in their respective corners, staring holes into the air and drooling over their shirts. The orderly on duty sat at the far end of the room and Izzy was confident that he was out of earshot. 

“Hey, man.” Izzy took the chair next to Duff. He gave Slash a short glance, wondering if he should send him away, but decided against it. If Axl knew, Slash would know in ten minutes at the latest. 

“Hi.” Duff smiled and his fingers stilled. “I moved.”

“I noticed,” Izzy replied. 

Duff frowned. “I’m not sure it was a good idea.”

“I’m not sure either.” Izzy grinned at Axl, who briefly stuck out his tongue. 

“We’ve got to ask you something,” Axl started, but Izzy stalled him with a sharp look. 

“Your things, Duff,” he said softly. “I’m going to bring them over to your new room. Is that OK?”

Duff nodded. He looked confused, Izzy thought, and it was not a result of drugs. Usually it meant that he was trying to come to grasp with something. 

“I shouldn’t have climbed onto the roof, should I?” Duff suddenly said. 

“Probably not,” Izzy replied carefully. It was the first time Duff spoke about it, maybe even the first time he truly remembered, and he didn’t want to choke him off. “Would be good if you didn’t do it again.”

Duff sighed. “I had to go, you know. ‘cause he was after me. I wanted to go downstairs, but he kept blocking my way. I could only go up and then there was nowhere else to go. Only the roof.” He shuddered. 

Izzy didn’t have to ask who “he” was. Now that they were roommates, Slash would have to deal with Duff in case he got a hallucination at night. He would have to give him more detailed directions about how to handle that best. At least Slash was sane enough to understand the importance of sheltering him from the doctors and their mission to normalize him. In fact, he might be one of the few persons who actually saw the fascination of Duff being the way he was. 

“I’ll hold you responsible,” he said and fixed Slash with a glare as dark as he could muster. 

“For what?” Slash asked back, and Izzy came to the realization, that he was losing his touch. His intimidation tactics weren’t working with Slash anymore. Oh well, as long as they still worked on Axl, he could deal.

“For Duff. That’s he’s OK at night. And if you touch him…,”

“Jesus, Izzy!” Slash rolled his eyes. “Get that twist out of your knickers, will you? Your boy is safe with me.”

Izzy tried to stifle a grin, but didn’t really manage. He wasn’t overly concerned, but defending Duff’s honour had turned into a habit that was difficult to shake off. Having two locked doors between the two of them was unsettling. 

“He might initiate something.” 

It was a distinct possibility. Duff didn’t have much with which to repay kindness and he used whatever he had. 

“Then I’ll send him back to bed, OK? And you owe me cigarettes. At least … five.”

“Three.”

“Four.”

“Deal. One buck each.” Four was all he had left anyway. 

“What?” Slash exclaimed. “That’s profiteering!”

“Try to get them cheaper,” Izzy replied unfazed. 

“Ninety cents.”

“One dollar. Each. Four all in all. Take it or leave it.”

“That’s the earning of a whole week!”

“Not my fault that payment is piss poor. And remember, I get ten percent anyway, so make sure you get your hands on the missing forty cents. Maybe Axl pays for a blowjob.”

“Hey!” Axl exclaimed. “Forty cents? I’m not that cheap!”

“You’re the one paying, not being paid,” Slash corrected him. 

“Oh,” Axl said. “Yeah, right. Forty cents are OK, I’d say. If you’re selling, I’m buying.”

Slash gave him an incredulous look. 

“If you give me all four now, I’ll pay your price next week. I wasted almost all of what I had on stupid M&Ms. I wasn’t aware that I would still need it. And I’ll stay on the distribution list. This isn’t a one-time thing.”

“Deal,” Izzy said and fished for a tissue. “Come by later, I’ll give them to you.”

“I’m sorry that you’re sick,” Duff said and brushed a hand over Izzy’s arm. “Want me to get you some chicken soup?” 

“No, thanks.” Izzy blew his nose before he pulled the key out of his pocket. “Is this yours?” 

Duff took it. He rubbed over the metal and smiled. “Yes.”

“Can I have it?”

“You mean, forever?” Duff frowned. 

“Just for a while. You’ll get it back.” 

“But only for a while.”

“I promise.” Izzy felt a twinge of guilt. He never lied to Duff, but he needed the key and didn’t have the energy to repeat the whats and whys at least a hundred times. 

Duff handed it over, but he didn’t seem happy about it. His collection was sacred to him. No matter what Axl thought, he knew exactly what shit he was housing under his bed, down to the last scratched up gaming piece he had nicked out of some beaten up compendium.

“Where did you get it?” 

“It was just lying there.”

“Lying where, Duff?”

Duff turned his head away and looked out of the window. 

“On the desk,” he finally offered. 

“Here in the hospital?”

Duff shook his head. 

“In somebody’s house?” 

After a while, Duff nodded his ‘yes’. He was slowly shutting off and now the trick was to keep the questions so low level, that he wouldn’t retreat completely. 

“And you stole it?” Axl jumped in. 

“Shut up,” Izzy growled. 

“You took it?” he asked. 

Duff shrugged. “Sure. It was just lying there. Next to the lion and the eagle.”

“The lion and the eagle?” Izzy asked confused. 

“Yeah.” Duff ripped another sheet out of the magazine in front of him and started folding it into another star. 

It was all the fault of Melinda Palmer, the woman who came once a month and offered sessions in art therapy. She was convinced that it would be easier for Duff to show what was going on inside him instead of talking about it. She probably thought he would one day draw sketches of how his father was molesting him or some such shit, but that would never happen. She hadn’t taken into account that Duff tended to be highly repetitive. Maybe the stars were related to whatever he was thinking at the moment, but instead of giving a complete picture, he would pick one tiny detail and repeat it for hours on end. 

“Is this a key for a bank safe?” Izzy tried the direct route, although he knew it wouldn’t work. 

“It was just there,” Duff repeated. “On the desk. Next to the lion and the eagle.”

Izzy wished for a cigarette, but he had only four left and they would all go to Slash. 

This would take a long time, but he was convinced that he would eventually get some usable information out of Duff. It was just a question of drawing the right conclusions out of answers that at first glance didn’t make much sense. Fortunately, he had lots of practice doing just that and no other pressing engagements to keep him from ploughing on. 

“Were they statuettes? The lion and the eagle?”

Duff shook his head. 

“A cat and a budgie?” Axl suggested. “Somebody who liked pets?”

Izzy gave him an appreciating glance. Sometimes Axl surprised him. A budgie and a cat wouldn’t help them much, but it was the way to solve the riddles Duff talked in. 

Duff shook his head. “A lion and an eagle.”

“What were they doing?” Izzy asked. “The lion and the eagle?” 

“Fucking,” Axl said. “Xenosex.”

Duff shrugged. “Nothing much. They were just sitting there. On the book.”

“A drawing? Or a photo?”

Duff hesitated. “I think they were real.” He nodded. “Yes, I’m sure they were. They just happened to sit on the book. They were playing with the money, I think.”

“A check book?” Slash suddenly asked. “About this size?” He indicated the form with his hands. 

Duff nodded. 

“Freeman’s Bank,” Slash said. 

Izzy stared at him. “What?”

“Freeman’s Bank,” Slash repeated. “They have a lion and an eagle in their logo. I bet it’s also on their checks.”

“I never even heard about that bank!” Izzy said. 

Slash grinned. “I knew somebody who worked there and I once picked him up from work for a night out. There’s a huge, ugly statue of an eagle sitting on a lion in front of it. It’s a small bank. Most of their customers are filthy rich. They pride themselves of being just as private and secretive as a Suisse bank.” 

“Duff?” Izzy took the magazine out of Duff’s hands. “Who owned the house?” he asked against better judgement. Questions like that never led anywhere with Duff. 

“Which house?” 

“The one where you took the key.”

“Which key?” 

“This one.” Izzy took the key and held it up. Then he quickly covered it with his hand before the orderly noticed. 

“Oh, that key. That’s mine. Can I have it back?”

“The house, Duff, where you found the key.”

“Can I have it back?”

“Soon. Who owned that house?”

Duff shrugged and looked out of the window again. 

“Have you been there often?”

“A few times.”

“And have you always stolen something?” Axl asked. 

Izzy could have strangled him. 

“Who else was there? You were not alone, were you?”

Duff sighed and suddenly he looked very unhappy, but also a lot more focussed. “I didn’t mean to do it, you know,” he said. “It’s not like I did it on purpose.”

“Do what? What Duff?” Izzy took a deep breath to quench his frustration. He loved Duff, really did, but sometimes it was hard to keep in mind that Duff didn’t function the way most people did. Was Chau feeling like this when he tried to get him to ‘open up’? 

“First, he was all fine, you know. I mean, he was breathing and making noises and I just knew that I was doing it right. Like they had shown me, you know. And then it all stopped. Just like that.” He gave Izzy a pleading look.

“Fuck,” Axl gasped. “You killed somebody! Wow.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Duff repeated. “I waited, you know. Just like they told me. With the lion and the eagle.”

“You killed somebody!” Axl repeated. “And they just let you run around in this house like you’re totally harmless? That’s fucking careless.”

“Shut up,” Izzy growled. If somebody died, then he didn’t believe for one moment that it was Duff’s fault. “Do you know who ‘they’ were?”

“Who?” Duff asked. His fingers were twitching towards the paper sheet, but he didn’t pick it up.

Izzy shook his head. “It’s not important.”

“But…,” Axl started, but Izzy only shook his head.

“Later,” Izzy said. If they were pushing it now, then Duff would get upset and if Duff got upset, it might just as well trigger another episode of demon sighting and he was so not up for one. The last one had caused enough problems, and Izzy could do without another incident in … well, ever. 

“Hey,” Axl suddenly piped up. “Wanna hear something nice for a change?”

“We get pizza for dinner,” Slash said. “Real ones. Because some unknown benefactor made a donation!”

“Idiot!” Axl replied, but he looked around expectantly and Izzy knew what he was waiting for. And for once he was willing to give it to him. Good news was as rare as love and affection from a paid whore, and he could use some.

“Tell us, Axl,” he said sweetly. “We’re all hanging on to each and every of your words,” he couldn’t keep himself from adding. 

“Hopton’s leaving,” Axl said, ignoring the quip.

“Oh, thank God!” Izzy exclaimed. That was really good news. “When?”

“No idea. Just heard two of the docs talk about it. Full of envy. And they tell us to get our emotions under control. Seems like they cherish this place just as much as we do. Anyway, he got some teaching position at some really fancy university somewhere. And I just thought, maybe we should apply as Duff’s new shrinks. We’re better at getting stuff out of him than Hopton ever was. I mean, how long did this take? Half an hour? And we already know that Duff’s killed somebody and stole the key to his bank safe. That’s more than he ever got.”

Slash snorted, but Izzy felt a spark of hope. Not a big one, because they would just assign Duff to the next idiot, but everybody was better than Hopton. He searched for another tissue in his pockets. He should probably get a roll of toilet paper with the way his nose was running. 

“I could get you some chicken soup,” Duff suggested, his chin resting on Izzy’s shoulder and his mouth almost at his ear. 

Izzy shook his head. 

“I’m sorry you’re sick.”

“Yeah,” Izzy said between two sneezes. “Me too.”


	8. A Day Out

Izzy spent the next days drinking chicken soup. Not that he wanted to, or that it did anything the least helpful for his cold. He was sniffling just as much, coughing just as much and feeling just as miserable as he would have without. If one was picky, one might add that it wasn’t chicken soup either, no matter what the label said. Duff had convinced Samantha that sick people needed soup, and because he was Duff, each time he showed up in the kitchen she pulled out a mug, spooned some instant shit out of a jar with a chicken on the label, and poured boiling water over the top. 

“Isn’t it coming out of your ears?” Slash asked, when Izzy was fighting his way to the bottom of yet another mug. “That’s number eight? Nine?”

“Thirteen,” Izzy growled. “Today!”

“Then why do you keep drinking it?” Slash wiped hair back from his face and Izzy made out honest puzzlement on his usually halfway hidden face. 

“For the same reason our room is filled with weeds,” Axl snapped. “Because Duff would look sad if he didn’t do it.”

“I already got rid of most of the weeds,” Izzy groused. He was still feeling like shit and having to deal with Axl’s grating voice day in day out didn’t do much to make his stuffed head feel any clearer. He was almost grateful for the sleeping pills they fed him each evening, they made sure that most of his enforced Axl-time was spent in oblivion. “But Duff keeps picking more.” 

For a moment they all sat in silence, Slash and Axl watching in rapt fascination, while Izzy did his best to gulp down the content of his mug before Duff could bring him a new one. Didn’t they have anything else to do? Probably not, that was one of the main problems with this place. 

He was sure that half of the plants in the dayroom would soon die from soil salination, but as Duff was currently just one table over, drinking was the way to get rid of this shit. 

“We need to look into the safe.” Izzy pulled a face when he was done. He had to be close to sodium glutamate poisoning. “Then we’ll know.”

Axl snorted. “Yeah, right. We just march out of here, buy a bus ticket to downtown L.A., and look into that safe. I don’t know about you, Izzy, but my next day of leave is in about twenty fucking years. And that’s an optimistic estimate.”

“We need somebody to go for us,” Izzy said. “Somebody we can trust. Anybody still got connections outside? Slash?”

Slash shrugged. “I could call my Mom. Or one of you can, ‘cause I’m not allowed near a phone. But she’ll probably think I’m suffering from drug induced psychosis and have convinced my poor, equally psychotic fellow inmates to go along with my ravings. I’m currently not even trusting her far enough to not inform the doctors.”

“Any friends?” Izzy asked. “That are not junkies? Sorry, not meaning to be rude here, but this might involve lots of money or … whatever. Nothing I would trust somebody with who is jonesing after the next fix.”

Slash shook his head, either because he didn’t have any friends, or because all his friends were indeed junkies. They were one pathetic bunch of losers. 

“Axl?”

Axl laughed harshly.

“Sorry, stupid question.”

“I have stopped trusting anybody the day I was kicked out of my Mom’s womb. Although…,” he rubbed his nose and then he cast a sly grin into Slash’s direction. “I bet Slash is scheduled for the next day out.”

“For what?” Slash asked. 

Izzy coughed. “But of course. You’ve been a good boy all month, haven’t you? And you’re harmless enough.” 

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Slash asked annoyed. 

“Day out,” Axl said. “Every other month there’s this awesome, fantastic outing they make. They go to the zoo or into a museum. If our ward has somebody on offer who is not a danger to society, they are allowed to go. They never let me go so far, and I bet they won’t this time either, but you… you’ve been all good and quiet and never gave them any trouble. And you’re not dangerous. You’re just a junky. So when they ask who’s interested, you’ll sign up.”

Slash scowled. 

“They always try to get one or two of us in, and currently … if I think about who’s here at the moment … your chances are pretty high.”

“And?” Slash ran a hand through his curls. “Think if I ask them to stop at Freeman’s because I need to have a look into my bank vault and count my grandma’s diamond earrings, they’ll let me?”

“You’ll sneak off,” Izzy said. “Do you have an idea where they’re going next?” 

“Botanic garden,” Axl said. “All the pretty greenhouses.”

“Perfect You’ll get lost. They’ll be busy keeping the crazies in check. They always take about two or three of them, to make sure they get some outside exposure.”

“Yeah, once they wanted to take Duff,” Axl said. “And all the time he kept saying how he wouldn’t go and how he didn’t want to, and when it was time to leave, he was hiding in a cupboard somewhere. So they left without him. And the bus had an accident. A pretty heavy one with some people breaking bones and shit. No joke. Anyway, since then, they don’t take Duff anymore either.”

Izzy knew the story, of course, although it had been before his arrival. Since his blasted cold had started, he wondered if Duff really only predicted or maybe produced these incidents. Maybe as soon as he made something up in his mind, it became reality. Now, that was a fascinating idea, one he should share with Doc Chau during his next therapy session. 

“So,” he returned to the topic at hand. “Just say that the joy of gardening has woken a keen interest in plants in you. You’re even thinking of applying for an apprenticeship as landscape gardener once you’re out and about again.”

Axl snickered and Slash rolled his eyes. “They will think I’m pulling their leg,” he said. 

“No,” Axl replied. “They don’t have enough of a sense of humour for that. They don’t even know you well enough. Do you really think Doc Johnson knows how much you suck at gardening? As long as you do as you’re told, and don’t try to gouge somebody’s eye out with a trowel, you get a little smiley drawn onto your chart, and that’s it. Start dropping hints about it during therapy today. Officially you don’t know about the outing, yet, so they’ll be all delighted if you are making plans for a future as a productive member of society.”

“And then?” Slash asked. “How is all this helping? I still won’t manage to get to the bank.”

“You’ll be all quiet and unsuspicious in the bus and in the park,” Izzy explained. “And then you’ll use your chances and sneak off. I have to think some more about the hows, but we’ll make a plan. You’ll leave the park, go to that bank and have a look into the vault.”

“You’re crazy,” Slash said. “You’re totally crazy.”

‘Yes,’ Izzy thought wryly, that was a serious possibility. It was surely a better explanation than the other way round: that they, and only they, understood what was going on, while all the sane, healthy, normal people were totally oblivious to a crime developing smack in the middle of them. 

“Why the fuck should I do that?” Slash continued. “And if I really went, do you think I’d be mad enough to come back?”

“Look,” Izzy said, trying to catch his air between bouts of coughing. “Something has happened to Duff, OK? Something really bad.” He cast a quick glance into Duff’s direction, but Duff was busy with more stars. He must have made about a hundred over the last days. “And the secret to that is hidden within that bank. And if we don’t get behind it, they’ll try again. And next time, they might succeed. “ 

Hopefully it was in there. It would be proof that he was not losing his mind. Suddenly he wondered if that was the real motivation behind his sudden need to look into the safe, to prove that he was not just making things up out of sheer paranoia. 

It was the drugs that made him question his sanity, he reminded himself. They had fucked with his mind before and they were doing it again. That’s why they were dosing them with this shit after all, to make them susceptible to all the nice little suggestions of how they should rearrange their lives and their reality according to standards that were compatible with the general public view. Once, for an hour or two, they had managed to make him wonder if he had really killed his wife’s lover in a bout of jealousy, and had just come up with a cover story to protect his poor, fragile psyche. 

“If you really think this has something to do with Duff, then why don’t you tell one of the staff? They are all obsessed with unriddling Duff’s past, they should jump at the occasion.”

Izzy gave him an incredulous look. “Did you really just ask me that?”

Slash shook his head. “No, forget it.” He sighed. “OK, fine. I’ll do it.”

“They won’t let him look into the safe, just because he’s got the key,” Axl objected. “I tried. You need identification and shit.”

“No, not at Freeman’s,” Slash replied. “As I said, I had a friend there and he once told me there was this guy. He had lost his key and made a hell of a ruckus about it. Wanted to take stuff out of his safe, but they wouldn’t let him. They don’t even tag a name to a safe, ‘cause it’s all so secret. Makes you wonder what kind of clients they have. Anyway, you have the key, you get in, you don’t have the key, bad luck. Never get into your safe ever again. And there’s only ever one key for the safe and you can’t make duplicates. So, if this key is really Freeman’s, then all I have to do is show it and they should let me into the vault.”

“Awesome!” Axl pulled at his hair until Izzy was sure it had to hurt. 

“But I want the full story,” Slash said. “What it is all about. Not just hints and snippets here and there.”

+++

Slash didn’t sleep that night. He was running the story around in his head like a never-ending record. It all sounded too fantastic to be true. Axl had already told him his part of this whole fantasy novel, and they had cobbled it all together with what Izzy was suspecting. Then they had slapped a dozen ifs and whens and maybes on top of it and now all they needed was a producer in Hollywood and the next blockbuster was on its way. 

According to Izzy and Axl, Duff had been a whore with interesting customers who led a life of crime, left precious keys lying around, and apparently died now and then. It was a cool way to go, he thought, being fucked into heart attack. If it had happened like that. Duff might have had totally innocent reasons to be at that house the night somebody had died, be it this church guy or somebody completely else. It was Axl who preferred the whore-version. In fact, he was obsessed with the idea. He had even speculated that maybe Duff’s blowjobs were that good that people regularly died from sheer exhaustion, and that he had left a string of dead people all over the country. With the way Izzy defended his exclusive right to them, one was developing ideas. 

In the end, it all sounded far too vague and fantastic. 

He looked through the dark room towards Duff, who was sleeping peacefully in his bed. Duff had been reluctant to leave the key to him. Slash wasn’t Izzy and apparently not as trustworthy as Keeper of the Key. Izzy insisted that Duff always had to get the full truth, meaning: they couldn’t just tell him that Izzy had taken the key, no, full disclosure with all the drama that entailed. 

Duff had kept asking about it every other minute until Izzy had bribed him with three of those four cigarettes he had previously given to Slash, and a handful of leftover M&Ms. Izzy, the bastard … and that should have been his middle name, by the way … had also laid claim to half of Slash’s allowance and a full 75% of Axl’s to pay for the bus ticket they would need. 

Now the key was hidden inside a pair of socks, together with the bus fare. Slash had the feeling that it was glowing not only through the wool, but also through the drawer and even the walls of the room. 

Izzy’s and Axl’s plan would be a total cock up. He had to stop thinking of Izzy as normal, he was at least as crazy as Axl, he was just hiding it better. Only lately he wasn’t even hiding it that good. Ever since the roof incident, something was different about Izzy, something he couldn’t really put a finger on yet. Slash had the feeling that he was slowly coming apart at the seams, and tried to hide it behind being extra surly. If maybe one of them really needed to talk about his feelings, it was Izzy, but hell would freeze over before that happened. 

So why hadn’t he just said ‘no’ when they had started talking him into this lunacy?

Leaving St. John’s as fast as possible was the top item on his to-do-list, and to reach this aim he had been as cooperative as he could from day one. His shrink was delighted about how well he had adjusted, and how he was growing more and more into the awesome person he could be; if he only stayed away from drugs and alcohol and anything else that was fun. 

In two weeks, that would change. In two weeks, he would sneak away during a stupid outing to a stupid botanic garden… and why was it always about gardening? … and would probably be caught too fast to even get out of the park. His only achievement would be to delay his departure from St. John’s for another year or so. He shuddered. 

Time seemed a strange thing in institutions like these. It was the never-ending routine. One day was just like all the others, there was nothing to look forward to, nothing to leave a dent in the constant repetitions of breakfast, work, lunch, therapy, dinner, bed time. If one didn’t take care, one got lost in the depths of a system that wasn’t used to letting go of what it had managed to get into its clutches. Axl was a perfect example of what could happen. 

There were enough inmates who had more the appearance of furniture than patients, who just belonged to the interior like the scratched-up chairs and tables, the flower pots and the medicine cabinets. Nobody even thought about reintroducing them to real life. All the doctors and nurses seemed convinced that they led content, fulfilled lives within the walls of St. John’s. 

It was an illusion they seemed to need to maintain their own complacency. Nobody ever bothered to disturb their fantasy of a happy, sheltered world and call St. John what it was: a prison, a dumping place for society’s losers, where everybody who didn’t fit the public idea of normal and functioning was locked away in order to keep the illusion of a smooth, normal outer world upright. 

Slash was convinced that he hadn’t closed as much as one eye all night, when all of a sudden, he realized that he must have fallen asleep. Maybe he was still asleep. Somehow the room felt different. The air was stickier and the pattern of breathing from Duff’s bed seemed to have changed. His skin crawled as if somebody was watching him, and for a moment he wondered if he was now sharing his room not only with Duff, but also with Duff’s demons. 

Carefully he opened his eyes, just a slit wide, as if he had to pretend that he was still asleep, but then his heart stopped and he forgot all caution. There was somebody standing next to Duff’s bed, bending over him. Even in the darkness he could see that it wasn’t Thomas, who was on night duty. Thomas was big and stocky. This was a tall, lean figure, dressed in a wide black cloak. 

Slash sat bolt upright and at exactly that minute the figure turned towards him. He saw two glowing, red eyes in a completely black face, a mouth pulled into a sneer and there, on its forehead, he could make out a pair of horns. 

For a second, he felt all air draining from his lungs, but then, before he even knew what he was doing, he started to scream. The figure turned around and fled. Slash sat in his bed, shell shocked and paralyzed with fear. His breaths got stuck in his lungs, his heart was hammering in his chest, and when the door was opened and Thomas switched on the light, all he could stammer was “The devil. Duff’s devil was here.”

+++

“You idiot,” Axl said. They were sitting at the breakfast table, going through the morning routine of forcing down food none of them felt like eating. “Do you have an idea what this might mean? They might not let you go for day out.”

“I told the doc that it was only a nightmare,” Slash mumbled, embarrassed. “I think he believed me.” At least he hadn’t felt the need to sedate him, just told him to go back to sleep. 

“Yeah right,” Axl sneered. “And he might still think it’s safer to keep you here, when you’re now going as batshit crazy as everybody else.”

“Everybody can have nightmares, OK?” Slash splashed his cornflakes over the rim of his bowl and onto the table. Maybe it had really just been a nightmare, but the figure had looked so real. 

There was nobody out there, Thomas had said, clearly not happy by the interruption, nobody who wore a black cloak or red horns or anything else he had seen, and Slash had felt it wouldn’t be wise to insist on it. 

Izzy had still grilled him for details, for every tiny little bit of what he had seen, until Slash had been short of telling him that he wouldn’t get more information out of him if he broke out his chainsaw and started to slice him up like a thanksgiving turkey. 

At least one person had seen the devil, too, though. Duff was his usual, almost catatonic self, not eating, not talking, and hardly moving. For once Slash understood how he was feeling. Being haunted by that thing was one of the most frightful experiences he could imagine; at least for somebody like Duff, who was unable to distinguish between reality and fantasy. 

For Slash so much was clear: if what he had seen that night had been more than a nightmare, then it had been human. If a human made a habit out of scaring Duff to death, then he probably had a very good reason and the only reason he could think of was related to the key in his oldest pair of socks. 

“Somebody is really after Duff,” he said. “It wasn’t a dream. Somebody was in the room. Somebody who had dressed up in a Halloween costume.”

“Yeah sure.” Axl snorted. “And all the other demons Duff keeps seeing? That woman with the scythe? And then there’s one who carries his head under his arm. Oh, and my favourite one is that guy whose eyes keep popping out of his face. And the net guy. You know the one who’s just a walking fishermen’s net that keeps shaping into a giant open mouth or a pair of hands or…”

“I don’t know about the others,” Slash interrupted him. “But this one was there. I didn’t dream.”

Izzy sighed. He looked a little bleary-eyed, and Slash was sure that Izzy’s sleep had been a lot deeper than his own. “OK,” he said, and his voice seemed to growl somewhere deep down in a rocky canyon. “You’ve seen the devil, right?” he asked as if it wasn’t what they had been talking about all morning. 

Slash nodded. He felt a bout of compassion while he watched how Izzy pulled himself visibly out of the chemical swamp, he lately spent a lot of time in. It was just what Axl had said the day Duff had almost jumped off the roof: they were teaching him a lesson. And to Slash’s dismay, they were being successful. 

“Last time Duff saw the devil at night somebody had tempered with my drugs. I was out like a light all night.” He laughed harshly. “Either that or this place is really making me paranoid. Which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately,” he added. 

“Thinking about what?” Axl asked.

“That I’m losing my mind. So far I thought you were the only one who was really insane.”

“Ha, ha,” Axl made.

“But maybe we’re all as crazy as everybody thinks,” Izzy went on without acknowledging the interruption. “Maybe, if you’re not a nutjob when you come here, you lose your mind after a while. From the environment. Self-fulfilling prophecy or something like that.”

It was a bet Slash wouldn’t have held up against. He surely felt like he was losing his last grasp on sanity every moment now. But unlike him, Izzy didn’t seem to mean it in a sarcastic way. Since his return from the basement, he wore an expression, that caused Slash to worry. Whatever they had done to him, it had shaken him to the core. He didn’t talk about it, not even as a joke, the way he made fun of everything that was happening around them, and that alone meant, his experience had been harrowing. There was something Slash had so far never seen on Izzy’s face: defeat. 

It wasn’t permanent yet, he still managed to shake it off, but Slash saw how hard he was fighting to not lose himself. Izzy was one of the toughest persons he had ever met, and if he was unable to keep his wits, how was Slash supposed to survive with his psyche intact? He didn’t stand a slip of a chance.

“Duff?” Izzy asked

Duff looked up from his untouched plate. 

“When you were up on the roof? What did the devil want from you?”

Duff looked up, but his eyes were almost dead. At first Slash thought he would deny having been on the roof at all, but then, to everybody’s surprise, he answered. “Jump,” he whispered. “He said that he would leave me alone, but I had to jump.”

Slash shivered. Maybe it was really time to tell one of the doctors. Whatever was going on, they couldn’t all be part of a complot. Maybe next time they wouldn’t be so lucky to get Duff back in one piece. 

Sadly, nobody would believe them. That was the most frustrating aspect of the whole affair, even if one of them watched an actual murder, it would be brushed away as hallucination. Fuck, he had seen the devil first hand, and had to disguise it as a nightmare. 

“You’re not going anywhere on your own,” Izzy said. “Do you understand, Duff?”

Duff looked absently out of the window. 

“Fuck,” Izzy muttered. “You and you,” he said and pointed at Slash and Axl. “One of us is with him at all times.”

Axl sneered. “Right. Also when he takes a shit?”

“Then you’ll wait in front of the door,” Izzy gave back. 

“In case the devil rises from the sewers?” 

“No. Just in case he’s hiding in the next stall.”

“You really think…” 

“Yeah,” Izzy said. “I think whoever has tried to shoot Duff that one day, has found him here and is doing his best to finish the job. We need to get into that freaking bank vault. And quick, ‘cause it looks as if Satan has decided to speed things up.”


	9. Family

“You know,” Slash said later that week when they were sentenced to another morning of gardening,” I’ve been thinking.”

“Wow. Really?” Axl hacked a piece of clay apart with a trowel. He never got any tools that left an impact, but he used those he die get for as much destruction as was humanly possible. “Fucking assholes, why do they have to shoo us out in that weather?”

“It’s not that bad.” Izzy looked up from his own bed and over to where Duff was busy hanging his self-made Christmas decoration into trees and bushes. Nobody told him to come back and get working. Probably because he was Duff. Sometimes Slash wished, he was Duff, too. 

“It’s fucking April,” Axl growled. “And it’s raining.”

Rain was a bit of an exaggeration, Slash thought. He had been hit by all of three drops during the last hour, but he did agree that it was cloudy and chilly and that he too would have preferred to go back into the house. Instead he was planting tomatoes under Izzy’s watchful eyes. 

Izzy had indeed been promoted to head gardener, it seemed. He had cursed up a storm about it, but it die make some sense. Find the one person within the whole mess who actually knew what he was doing, make it part of their therapy to instruct the rest of them, enjoy a nice, free morning and have everybody else suffer. Well, not everybody, just him and Axl. Apparently, Izzy was not allowed to be mean to just every random inmate who crossed his path. Instead he took out his bad temper on those who he knew wouldn’t rat him out. Which was not nice, to put it mildly. 

“Who said I was a nice person?” Izzy had asked, when Slash had confronted him with his complaints. “Tell them they are a liar, and then get your fucking tomatoes into the soil, they’re already wilting.”

Tomatoes! They had tons of those. Izzy was apparently gearing up for a ketchup factory. At least, Slash had to admit, the gross domestic product of their group had doubled overnight. If there was a gardening competition between wards, they would win big-time. Most of the guys were so afraid of Izzy, that he didn’t have to be mean. A dark look was enough and the speed of weeding, watering and raking increased significantly. 

“So, what have you been thinking about?” Axl asked, glaring at his own tray of tomatoes, as if he had personal business with it. “And why have you decided to share this special moment with us?”

Yes, Izzy had decided that Axl could be trusted with living beings again. At least if they had leaves and not legs. 

“If you kill only one of these fucking plants,” Izzy had said when he had handed the tray over, “I’ll make you pay tonight. And don’t think I’ll be too drugged to follow through on that promise.”

After that Axl handled the pots like a mother would her newborn. 

“If the devil is inside this house and comes into our room in the middle of the night, doesn’t that mean he’s got to be one of the staff?”

Izzy shrugged. “Or an inmate who managed to get his hands on the keys. Like Axl for example. Keep working, Slash, or we’ll be here all day.”

Axl sat back on his haunches. “Since when did you know?”

Izzy chuckled. “You never manage to keep anything to yourself. You’re always too smug about it. You keep dropping hints here and there until it’s not difficult to draw conclusions.”

“Fuck you,” Axl said. 

“You’ve two more beds to finish, when you’re done with this one,” Izzy gave back. “I would get a move on, if I were you.”

“You’ve got keys?” Slash asked perplexed. “To all the doors? And you’re still here?”

Axl shook his head. “Just to the ward and some of the offices. Not even all of them. The bedrooms, that's a universal one. All open with the same key. I wished I had the main key ‘cause then I would have long been gone. Although, even when you’re out of the house, there’s still the gate. I can get into the corridor, but not farther. In the end, doesn’t help much.”

“But how?”

“It’s easy.” He shrugged. “Doc Johnson let them lie around and I took them.”

“And he didn’t notice?”

“Sure. But do you have an idea how much it costs to exchange all these special locks with special registered keys? So, they never reported it.”

Slash shook his head and tried to erect his plants along stakes the way Izzy had told him to. Unfortunately, Izzy was a lot more particular regarding correctly planted plants than Leo had been, and was already frowning unhappily at the result. Gardening had been bad before. Now it was a fucking nightmare.

“I can’t believe this,” he said.

"I can't believe what you're doing to those poor tomatoes," Izzy muttered. 

“Don’t tell me you’re worried about the lack of safety,” Axl mocked. “But I guess Izzy’s right. Who says I’m the only one who’s got a key? What about visitors?”

Slash drew his lower lip inside his mouth and let it back out with a plop. “Too many devil sightings lately. He would have to hide somewhere each time, then sneak through the house and leave without anybody noticing. I’d say it’s somebody in here.”

Duff had finished his Christmas decoration and joined them. His weeds had grown into enormous proportions, but he still made sure the plants were all properly staked and watered, each time they were here. Slash didn’t consider himself to be petty, but watching how Duff got to play around, while the rest of them were suffering under Izzy’s slave-driver-streak, made him want to sneak out at night and pour herbicides over the weeds. 

“There’ll be a full moon tonight,” Duff said while petting something that looked like a stinging nettle. “And a swan. Or several.”

“Cool,” Izzy said. 

Axl snorted. “I looked out of the window last night. We’re pretty far from a full moon. And I guess a swan has been shitting into your brain, huh?”

“Chicken for dinner?” Slash suggested. There _was_ some sense to what Duff said, at least sometimes, and it wasn’t even that difficult to find out what he meant; at least for somebody who didn’t have anything else to do than listening the whole day long to Duff’s stories instead of once per week during an hour of therapy session. Solving Duff-riddles had become one of his favourite pastimes. 

“That doesn’t explain the full moon,” Axl repeated stubbornly. 

“Who gives a fuck about a full moon?” Slash snarled. 

“I do!” Axl screamed. “Just because you’re getting all the blow jobs now doesn’t mean you have to be so fucking arrogant about it.”

“I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about!” Slash yelled back. He knew that there was no sense in yelling at Axl, that he was only riling him up, but it was also a very welcome occasion to blow off some steam. 

He had not been in the best mood since he had set a foot out of bed. During his therapy the day before, Dr Johnson had hinted that maybe he would be allowed to leave St. John’s in a month or two. Apparently, they were happy with his progress, although Slash wasn’t sure what should have changed about him. 

But instead of being on his best behaviour until the lucky day, he was about to sneak away during an outing to a botanical garden with a dozen other idiots. Surely that would drown his sunny prospects in a downpour of extra sessions and extra prison-days. And maybe even a stay in the basement, from which he would come back looking just as defeated as Izzy. 

Nobody would believe him that he had just gone lost. He wasn’t Duff and he didn’t get extra treatment. 

“Shut the fuck up!” Izzy hissed. “Or they’ll scratch you off the list next week.”

“Fuck, then why don’t you try yourself to get onto one of those fucking outings to a fucking botanical garden,” Slash growled. “I’m only interested in plants if you can smoke them. But I’d happily give you the key.”

“They can’t let him go,” Axl said. “’cause he’s a chainsaw murderer.”

“What?”

Izzy gave him a consternated look and Axl quickly covered his mouth with his hands. 

“What did you just say?”

Slash stalled. He wondered if Izzy would now kill Axl, by strangling him for example, or snapping his neck. Somehow, during the last days he had forgotten that Izzy was a crazy mass murderer. 

“I didn’t mean that as an insult,” Axl said carefully. “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, right? And sometimes it involves a chainsaw. And, really, that’s fine with me. It’s the right tool if you want to make it .. you know … big.”

“Have you lost your mind?” Izzy asked. “Oh, fuck, of course you have.” He stood up, leaving the tons of tomatoes to Slash and Axl. Duff, of course, followed suit. 

“Smoke?” he asked hopefully and once more Slash thought that Izzy should be more generous with his sources. He was the one who was going to risk his neck, so why was Duff getting all the cigarettes?

“We don’t have any left. So, it’s, just air that isn’t polluted by nutjobs.”

“Then he shouldn’t have taken Duff along,” Axl grumbled when Izzy walked down to the other side of the vegetable garden, Duff on his heels like a puppy. 

“So, is he now a chainsaw murderer or not?” Slash asked. 

“’course he is.” Axl rammed his trowel into the earth until the hilt was bent. “He’s just touchy about it, that’s all. You’d be touchy, too, if you were a chainsaw murderer.”

+++

Eventually it did start to rain and the industrial production of tomatoes was delayed to another day. Nobody cried. 

They had just had lunch, when Lucas approached them. 

“Axl?” he said, his voice so gentle, the hairs on Slash’s arms were standing up. “Dr Johnson would like a word with you.”

Axl was apparently just as confused by the tone, because he didn’t even start to complain. He cast Slash a look that spoke of the same worry he felt himself, and followed Lucas out of the room. 

“What was that about?” Slash asked, but Izzy only shrugged. He did look after them, though. 

They had all returned to their usual activities, when suddenly they were shaken up by screaming. Axl. There was no mistaking that voice, loud and piercing and with far too much stamina to be anybody else’s. Axl, so it seemed, could hold a single scream over minutes without having to come up for breath. Slash was convinced he sometimes did it just to find out for how long he could go. This time though, it was different. They were treated to a whole cacophony of shrill, pained noises. 

Everybody had jumped up, but after a disturbed look towards the door, Izzy sat down again. 

“What’s wrong with him?” Slash asked, when the screaming just wouldn’t stop. Yes, they were all making fun about Axl, and they were all used to his outbursts, but this … this was something else. 

“No idea,” Izzy replied, for once not in the mood to poke fun at Axl’s expense either. “But notice how the staff is all calm?”

Slash looked around and Izzy was right. There were more orderlies in the room than usual, too. They had gotten the local disturbance quickly under control, and now were pretending that this was just another normal day. 

“Yeah. What … what does that mean?”

“They expected it,” Izzy said. “Nobody is surprised. Whatever they’re doing, that was … kind of planned.”

“You mean they’re riling Axl up on purpose? I thought that was only you.”

Izzy rolled his eyes. “I mean, they knew he would react like that. And Lucas is never this gentle with Axl. He knew, too. Maybe some bad news or something.”

For Izzy, the topic seemed to be finished, but Slash couldn’t quench his worries this easily. The screaming stopped after a while, but Axl didn’t return. 

“Will they take him to the basement?” he asked, unable to just let go. Would they get Axl back all broken, too? 

“Probably,” Izzy replied, not looking up from the magazine he was leafing through. He didn’t appear as if he was reading, just flipping back and forward in order to have something to do.

“What did they do to you down there?” Slash bit his lip. Izzy didn’t like questions like that, fuck, Izzy didn’t like any personal questions at all, but if Izzy couldn’t take the torture chamber, how was Axl supposed to manage?

“If it is any consolation,” Izzy said, still not looking up, “I don’t think they are going to blame him for this outburst. As I said, they expected it to happen. Means they’ll take care of him until he has calmed down. Nothing worth striving for, but not too horrible either. They won’t punish him for something he can’t control.”

“How long…,” 

“I have no idea, Slash.” For once Izzy didn’t sound irritated. “It’s not the first time, OK?”

Later, Slash approached Lucas to ask.

“Axl needs some time alone,” Lucas replied. It was similar to the bullshit he had fed them about Izzy, so that wasn’t exactly reassuring. 

“What …,” Slash started, not sure how to finish the sentence. “Did somebody die?” 

“No, no,” Lucas quickly said. “It’s just that … he got a visitor, but it was not a good idea. That’s all.”

A visitor? Slash returned to where Duff had moved over to Izzy, almost cuddling up to him. If it weren’t for Izzy enforcing an inch of distance between the two of them, he probably would. He had gotten very careful about how much proximity he permitted Duff. There was a lot less touching than Slash had witnessed at the beginning. 

Izzy reached for his tea mug, but then put it down quickly. His hand was shaking so badly, he couldn’t lift it without sloshing the content over himself. So, whatever was happening to Axl, it didn’t leave him as indifferent as he tried to pretend.

Duff, it seemed, had noticed, too. He took Izzy’s hand into his own and started rubbing it between his fingers. Slash almost felt like a stalker watching the two of them. After a while Duff took the cup, carefully folded Izzy’s hand around it, and this time Izzy was calm enough to hold it up. 

Separating those two was the mistake of the century. For a long time, Slash had thought it was a fairly one-sided, and maybe even slightly questionable relationship, one he hadn’t liked to think too much about. Izzy acted as Duff’s protector and while he surely loved him, Slash had sometimes wondered if Duff was actually able to consent to sex with anybody. It had been Duff’s ongoing serenity around Izzy that had put him at ease. No matter how childlike he appeared, Duff was an adult. He probably had adult needs, too. If he enjoyed sex with Izzy, then who was Slash to judge them?

But lately he noticed, that their relationship had a lot more facets than were obvious at first glance. Duff was the only person Izzy tolerated in his vicinity, when he was showing weakness. He also had a good feeling for when Izzy needed support and how to give it. Those two didn’t even require words to communicate – which was lucky, because conversation with Duff was exhausting – they just understood each other’s needs and took care of them. 

“Axl got a visitor,” Slash said, deciding that he was really starting to be a creep, when he watched from afar how Izzy quickly brushed through Duff’s hair before folding his hands virtuously around his mug again. He cast a glance towards the orderly, clearly worried that he had been spotted, but the man was busy comforting somebody who was crying about … whatever. “I thought there wasn’t anybody caring about him anymore.”

“His sister?” Izzy asked back, bringing another inch of distance between himself and Duff. “I think she still keeps contact.”

Slash stalled. He thought back to that moment under the oak, when Axl had told him a bit about his family and how they were glad he was gone. His sister, he remembered, would sometimes write. Now she had finally decided to come and visit the lost brother. Slash thought, he himself would be happy to see anybody after ten years of institutionalization, but Axl was less forgiving than he was. 

“Is she really the only one?” he asked. “Of his whole family?”

“As far as I know.” Izzy took another sip, the contents in the mug sloshing around dangerously. Duff started to run his hand up and down his arm, which did the trick and kept the trembling at bay. “I think there is a brother, too, but no idea, really. Just hearsay. Axl doesn’t talk about his family.”

‘You don’t either,’ Slash almost retorted. Izzy never got any visitors, but who would visit a chainsaw murderer? Maybe his family preferred to forget that he existed. 

+++

After two days, Axl still wasn’t back and nobody would tell them anything. Instead Dr Johnson addressed it during Slash’s therapy session. 

“You are getting along well with Axl, aren’t you?” he suddenly asked to Slash’s surprise. 

“Yes,” he replied. 

“You’re the closest he has ever come to making a friend since we have been charged with his care.”

“Uhm,” Slash made. Was that a compliment? He was never sure if it was good to get along with Axl or rather not. “How is he doing?”

“Better.” Johnson rubbed his chin. “We will likely keep him for a few more days which is why … he would like to see you.”

Slash sat up straight.

“It is actually the first time he has ever asked after anybody, which is why we would like to grant him his wish.”

“Sure,” Slash replied. 

“It is really up to you,” Johnson went on. “There is no pressure and while Axl is … calmer again, he might still fly off the handle if triggered. So, if you would rather not… the decision is up to you.”

“I’ll see him, if he wants me to, no problem. Did his sister visit?” Slash asked and Doc Johnson sighed. 

“Gossip really travels fast in this place. Yes, his sister visited. It triggered … memories. If you are willing to take the chance and see Axl, then do not mention her or this visit or his family in general. Can you do that? He is not really stable yet, but on a good way to getting there again. Which is why we have decided to grant him his request. You can talk about your daily life here, anything that has happened over the last days, but do not, under no circumstances, ask questions. 

“Ok,” Slash said. “I can do that.” 

He knew Axl had not been on good terms with his stepfather, the fucker had him committed after all. So maybe his sister had made the mistake and talked about him. But did that justify such an outbreak? Over days? It was an old story, shouldn’t he be used to it? Slash got the feeling that there had to be more. Even if seeing his sister had triggered old memories, she was at least still caring about him, and tried to keep contact. Shouldn’t that make him happy? 

Maybe he was reading too much into this. They were talking about Axl after all, and Axl could be difficult. It wasn’t the first time, Izzy had said, and Izzy had been here for far longer. Maybe Axl had just been in a good phase, when Slash had joined the madness, and was now relapsing into standard behaviour. 

“Good.” Doc Johnson didn’t look completely convinced, more like somebody had talked him into the idea. “There will somebody be waiting outside. In case you decide it gets too much.”

Slash nodded, not sure what to say to that. Axl often got too much, it was part of his personality. 

At least it cut his session short. They left the therapy room, but to Slash’s surprise they didn’t descend into the basement. Instead they went to the upper floor and stopped at the end of a corridor. The orderly waiting for them was not somebody Slash knew overly well. Carl, he reminded himself. That was his name. He was usually there for the nightshift, didn’t talk much to the patients, and seemed to mainly function as an additional pair of hands in case of emergency. 

“All right. I’ll leave you to it then,” Johnson said, giving him an encouraging pat onto his shoulder. “If you need assistance, Carl will help you.”

Hesitantly, Slash opened the door and entered. He wasn’t sure what he had expected, restraints at a minimum, maybe even a straightjacket, from the way Johnson was acting. Instead Axl sat on the corner of the bed in a room that just looked like any normal hospital room he had ever seen. He was dressed in boxer shorts and a t-shirt, his feet in socks, but no shoes in sight. Nothing sharp or breakable either. Even the window had a wire cover from the inside. 

“Hi,” Slash said. The room was a bit overheated and he took off his sweater “How’re you doing?”

“How do you think?” Axl grumbled. 

“You tell me.” 

He shrugged. “At least I get to sleep without Izzy breathing down my neck. I would offer you a drink, but I have only that.” He pointed at a plastic cup next to the bed. 

“I’m fine. All the tea in the world in the dayroom.”

Axl snorted. 

Not sure what to do, Slash stuffed his hands into his pockets and suddenly his fingers stumbled over the M&Ms Duff had given him earlier that morning.

“For Axl,” he had said. 

“Duff sends these.” He pulled the offering out of the pockets. Two green ones, one yellow, one red, the last one added as an afterthought, and it had clearly cost him to hand it over. 

“Oh man!” Axl laughed, and Slash suddenly felt a lot better. Axl didn’t look like Izzy had at all. Exhausted, yes, with dark circles under his eyes, but he was still himself. “He’s such a moron.”

He did take the M&Ms though and Slash was sure, he was happy about the gift. If he had never asked for visitors before, then he probably hadn’t gotten any get-well gifts either. Sure, it was a pitiful present, the colour already rubbing off, and there was lint sticking to them after Slash had kept them in his pocket, but it was the thought that counted. Axl didn’t eat them, but put them down onto the bedside table. 

“What about you? Picked any weeds for me?”

Slash grinned. “I didn’t know I would visit, or I would have gotten you a few of the bean seedlings. You could have tended to them up here, like that canary guy in Alcatraz.”

“Maybe they would have grown big enough to climb down from the tower.”

“I think to climb down, you have to grow out your hair. The bean stalks went up.”

Axl snickered. He looked almost at ease, now. 

“How are the guys doing?” he asked. 

“OK. Izzy’s a bit jittery. Ever since … you know.”

“Yeah.” Axl ran his nails up his arm. They were extra short, Slash noticed, barely long enough to do any damage, but he had still managed to leave scratches all over his skin. “Really hit him, that they moved Duff out of his room. Guess they threatened him with separating them for good, if he didn’t clean up his act. And Duff? Crazy as always?”

“He has moved on from Christmas stars to Christmas garlands.”

“You guys still taking care he’s not alone?”

Slash nodded. “I got signed up for the outing today.”

“Cool!” Axl significantly brightened.

“You were right. Doc Johnson was absolutely delighted that I was making plans and showed interest in life and my future. I even got a brochure about the botanical garden because I was so excited.”

Axl snorted. “Might be useful,” he said then. “Does it have many pictures? Can help us with getting a feel for the lay of the land.”

“Better,” Slash replied. “It’s got a map. I’ll show it to you when you’re back. Which is … do you have an idea?”

He wondered if this was being pushy already, but Axl didn’t seem to think so. 

“Dunno. They won’t say. Soon, I hope. Might be just as shitty downstairs as up here, but, man, I’m sick of listening to my own voice.”

That, Slash thought, was a first. 

They chatted a bit more, before the door opened, and Doc Johnson showed his face. His gaze was quickly travelling between Axl and Slash, but then he looked pleased. 

“Get better soon, OK?” Slash said, taking the prompt that the visit was over. “We’re missing you.”

Axl snorted, but just with Duff’s M&Ms, he looked happy about the statement. 

Slash stood up. He hesitated for a moment, but then he wrapped his arms around Axl and hugged him. Axl went all rigid, and for a second Slash feared, he had made a mistake and would now trigger another episode. But then Axl’s arms came up and he hugged him back, hesitantly at first, as if he had forgotten how to do this, then with full force, putting a lifetime’s need for affection into it. 

+++

It took two more days until Axl returned. Slash had been allowed to visit for half an hour per day and the second time, even Izzy had sent his regards. 

Now they were back in the dayroom, staring at the flyer about the Botanical Garden of the City of Los Angeles. Izzy was studying the crude map, inspected each and every picture for as many details as possible and finally decided, that Slash should got for it in the rain forest. 

“Look at those photos,” he said and pointed out a tiny image of one of the green houses. “The paths are so narrow that no more than two persons can walk next to each other. It’s so full of plants that you’ll be long gone before anybody even notices you’re missing.”

Slash neither agreed nor disagreed. In the end he would have to play it by ear, no matter how much they planned. 

The next days were spent in a similar fashion. Izzy and Axl were drilling him as if they were about to send him out on a suicide guerrilla mission. Then they took the brochure away and made him draw up the map from memory. If he mixed up the bamboo garden with the Alpine section, they tore it into pieces and made him start new. When they were finally content, Slash was able to recreate a map of the park with his eyes closed.

He was prepared. Mission Freeman’s Bank was ready for take-off.


	10. Botany Bay

The day of the outing came and Slash felt positively sick as he climbed with fifteen other crazies into the bus that was parked in front of the entrance. One psychologist and three psychology students from UCLA accompanied them, making it a patient to handler ratio of 1:4. Not a promising factor, regarding their endeavour. Listening with only one ear to their instructions about what to do and what not to do he felt like a seven-year-old on a school trip. He could make out Axl behind one of the windows on the first floor, and when the bus driver started the engine, the first tingles of dread accompanied the sickness in his stomach. 

Slash felt for the key in his pocket. While the bus rattled along the highway, he mentally went once more through the motions of drawing up the map, just to keep himself from getting as jittery as Izzy was. When they reached the botanical garden, he had come once more to the realization, that their plan was total bullshit. Only a bunch of inmates of an insane asylum could cock up such a pre-planned failure of an undertaking. He would just follow through with the stupid outing, look at plants, return to the bus, and tell Izzy and Axl that, sorry, the guard dogs had been too careful to make an escape possible. 

He was one of the last to leave the bus. He would have preferred to just stay put and wait for the rest of the horde to return, but he had been long enough at St. John’s to know that having a sudden change of heart about the need to look at plants would not go over well. 

“Hide somewhere in the middle,” Axl had said. “Never draw attention to yourself by falling back or so. And wear a fucking baseball cap, ‘cause people will notice immediately if that mop of yours is missing.”

It had sounded plausible, but now that he was back in the real world, where ‘normal’ people watched them curiously, all he wanted to do was separate himself from the others, pretend that he didn’t belong to this pitiful group of castaways and that he just happened to walk in the same direction. 

He rearranged the baseball cap to allow more hair to fall into his face, hunched his shoulders and tried to fall back a few steps. 

“On you go,” One of the students, a pretty young woman with blond curls and blue eyes, tapped over cheerfully on his shoulder. Slash flinched back and for once he understood Axl’s tendency towards violence. If he had to deal with this forced primary school cheeriness for as long as Axl had, with no way out for the rest of his life, he would ask Izzy where he was hiding his chainsaw and go on a rampage. 

Instead of telling the woman where to stuff it Slash quickly closed up to the rest of the group. He couldn’t rule out that she might offer to take his hand, if he didn’t. 

The park was large. Most of it consisted of outdoor areas, and it took ages of looking at roses, bamboos, and artfully arranged rock gardens, until they finally reached the green houses. 

When they approached the first building in the row, Slash felt his heartbeat speed up with every step. Each greenhouse represented a different vegetation zone. The tropical rain forest was number four and was reached over a bridge that connected it to number three: the bottleneck in his flight route. If they noticed his getaway too early, that was where he could get stuck. Once he was out of the glass houses and back in the park, his chances would rise exponentially, even if he would have to climb over the fence somewhere instead of leaving through the gate. Without really seeing anything he admired plants in all shapes, forms and sizes until they finally neared the scene of escape. 

When he passed through the doors into the misty interior, the sudden increase in heat and humidity almost took his breath. Artificial waterfalls rippled over artificial rocks and the shrill screeches of birds tore through the air. Huge plants grew up to the tree-high ceiling, and stretched their branches and leaves like fans over the narrow, winding path. 

They all lined up, one behind the other, and just like he had been instructed, Slash took care to get a place in the middle. Their caretakers positioned themselves two at the top and two towards the end. Perfect. There were at least four persons between him and the next watchdog. He felt his hair curl up in the humidity, but he was pretty sure that it wasn’t only the heat that made sweat run down his neck in sticky beads. Ahead he could already make out the intersection they had marked on the plan. Here a second path veered off to the left, immediately made a bend and led back to the bridge towards the cloud forest. At this corner the vegetation was so thick that he should be out of view within three steps. Slash's heartbeat increased until he was convinced somebody had to hear it.

In the end, it was almost too easy to slip away. Exactly at the right moment commotion broke out at the end of the row, when one of their group, a guy named Max, got a nervous breakdown in front of a mango that had fallen onto the path. Slash quickly ducked to the side, made a forbidden dash through a group of coffee trees, reached the second path, and was hidden from their minders by impenetrable shrubberies. 

He expected somebody to call after him any moment, but the drama in front of the mango seemed to grow into unexpected proportions. Max screamed louder than the tropical birds and when Slash closed the door behind himself, it suddenly occurred to him that he could just leave and never come back. All he had to do was throw the key away and run. Nobody would ever look for him. He was neither dangerous nor important enough to warrant any type of police actions. A junky who had skipped rehab, L.A.’s police had more pressing cases at hand than hunting him down. 

And, fuck, this is what he would do. He couldn’t just return and face another year being slapped onto his sentence. Izzy wasn’t getting it, he was facing years anyway, what were a couple months more or less? But Slash still had a life left in front of him and he wasn’t going to ruin it for Duff’s hallucinations.

He took a deep breath and ran. From the rain forest he knew the shortest route to the exit by heart and suddenly he was glad about all the drilling Axl and Izzy had insisted he would need. He didn’t even need to think where he was going, he just knew. 

First, he hurried through the cloud forest, slowing down a little when he noticed that he was attracting curious glances, then through the half desert, the desert, through the rose garden and past the swan lake. 

The swan lake. 

‘There will be a full moon. And a swan. Or several.’

He stopped briefly and felt for the key in his pocket. He hadn’t been sleeping well last night, and when he had stood up and looked out of the window, he had noticed that the moon was almost full. Tonight, it might very well be. And they hadn’t had chicken for dinner the whole week. 

He should just throw the key into the lake and leave, but then he saw Duff before his inner eye, telling the story of where he had found it. 

‘He was breathing and making noises and I just knew that I was doing it right. Like they had shown me.’

Like they had fucking shown him. 

He thought of Duff, his soft smile and friendly eyes and how he had given up his M&Ms for Axl, although they were the only thing, he ever got for himself. He thought of the way he petted freaking stinging nettles, and brushed over Izzy’s hands to soothe the tremors that were getting more and more frequent. 

‘They’ had picked him up somewhere, had trained him like a fucking dog, and had tried to shoot him like one when he had turned from a source of money to an inconvenience. And when that hadn’t worked out, ‘they’ had decided that hounding and scaring him until he was ready to jump off a roof would be a good idea. 

Suddenly Slash felt such a fury boil up inside him, that for a moment it took his breath away. Being clearheaded came at a big disadvantage: one could not longer deny that the world was full of shit. At this moment he knew he couldn’t just leave. Duff’s puppy-dog-eyes would haunt him on his deathbed. 

He reached for the key, hoping that maybe he had lost it during his flight. Unfortunately, he hadn’t. There it was, tiny and hard in his pocket. 

The exit was right ahead and avoiding to look at anybody, he pulled the baseball cap into his face, passed the gate, and went in search for the next bus station. 

+++

“The fucker made a runner,” Axl said for the fifth time in just as many minutes. “I bet there was a shitload of money in the safe and he just took it and is now sipping champagne on a plane to the Bahamas.”

Izzy ignored him. It was past eight and he was silently starting to agree with Axl. 

The day room was busy with the usual suspects, and the noise level was bordering on nerve wrecking. Chairs screeched over linoleum, doors were banging, things clashed on the floor, and on top of that the constant whimpers and occasional outcries from the craziest of the crazies. 

Normally it wasn’t this bad, but those who had come back from the outing were still hyper after the short glimpse on the real world, and produced more turmoil than they usually would. Another reason for tension was, of course, that the staff was on edge after Slash’s unauthorized absence, and snapped at each and everybody. 

Snapping only ever made things worse. Nobody here was loud because they were trying to be annoying, they were just annoying by default. Attempts to suppress that, were never leading anywhere. 

“I tell you, the fucker’s not coming back,” Axl said. “He’s gone with all the money and nobody even tries to stop him. Where are the cops when you need them, huh?” He was shifting on his seat, scratching at his arms and kicking his heels against the legs of the chair. “It can’t be so difficult to find somebody like Slash, for fuck’s sake. Somebody with so much hair? You could spot him from a helicopter in the middle of the Christmas Parade.”

Izzy picked up one of the outdated magazines, and immersed himself into an article about the beneficial effect which drinking large quantities of water had on skin problems. 

There hadn’t been an alternative. Slash had been their best shot at getting into the safe, and if that little punk had indeed run off into freedom, then Izzy would one day find him and rip out his curls one by one. It still didn’t change that in their current situation, Slash had been the man to go. 

He looked up when Duff approached him, the usual big question marks in his eyes. 

“It’s time to open the presents.” He sat down next to Izzy, edging his chair near enough to touch. 

Izzy felt a strange sensation rise in his throat, a weird mixture of love and desperation, which he swallowed immediately. He’d known right from the beginning that growing attached to Duff had no future and still he had let it happen. Now it was all blowing up right into his face. 

No matter how hard he tried, he wouldn’t be able to keep Duff safe. One day he would wake out of a drug stupor, and be told that Duff was dead, be it that he had found ways to slit his wrists, hang himself in a storage cupboard, or maybe had died from a sad, early case of heart failure. No investigation necessary. 

He was a freaking inmate in a freaking insane asylum, and up against somebody who held all the trumps in his hands. How was he supposed to manage that? With only Axl as support? It was impossible. 

“It’s still a bit until Christmas,” he said. He swallowed again, but couldn’t keep the roughness in his throat from creeping into his voice.

His hand started to tremble again and immediately Duff covered it with his own, rubbing tiny circle into his palms and up and down each of his fingers. It helped most of the time, and so he allowed it, whenever the staff was too busy to notice. 

Since they had been deprived of early-morning-cuddling-time, Duff tried to get more physical contact over the day. Izzy couldn’t let that happen. They were on probation and if he couldn’t make sure that Chau believed he was making an effort, who knew what he would do next? In his desperation, Izzy had even started to chat up random patients now and then, to pretend he was at least trying to be a social creature. The things he did for Duff!

“You sure?” Duff asked, not convinced at all. 

Izzy nodded. For almost two weeks now, Duff was busy with Christmas decorations. He had turned the huge spruce in the far corner of the garden into a Christmas tree, full of paper stars and paper garlands, and because he was Duff, Lucas had eventually given him tinsel and even connected electric lights. Now St. John’s had a Christmas tree blinking in the balmy April nights. 

“OK,” Duff said, but he still stared longingly out of the window towards his tree, and in a couple of minutes he would ask again. 

“Really,” Axl said. “I don’t think he’ll come back. I bet he’s…”

“Shut up!” Izzy yelled, unable to take it anymore. He rolled the magazine up and considered smacking Axl onto the head with it, but under the current stares he received from all sides he slumped back onto his seat. 

Duff put his chin onto his shoulder, and Izzy took a deep breath, reminding himself that killing Axl would only prolong his stay at St. John’s. It might still be worth it. He couldn’t leave anyway. Not if Duff had to stay. Never. It would kill them both. 

“Merry Christmas,” Duff whispered. 

“It’s still several months until …” Izzy stopped.

All of a sudden there was upheaval outside. Hurried steps on the staircases, voices, a couple of shouts. Axl jumped off his chair, Izzy followed suit and before the door was shut into their faces, he caught a glimpse on a mob of curly hair sticking out from under a baseball cap. 

“Looks like he didn’t make a runner,” Axl said after they had both returned to Duff. “That idiot. I would have made for Hawaii by now.”

“Can we now open the presents?” Duff asked. 

Axl ignored him. “What if they search him and find it? Fuck, the money I mean. Or the photos. Or the videotape.”

Izzy gave him a horrified look. “I hope he wasn’t so stupid to bring it.” 

Of course, they would search Slash. Full body cavity search at that. He was a junky and a junky getting AWOL was only after one thing: a fix. Therefore, he had told him explicitly to not risk bringing the content of the safe, but leave it where it was. As long as they had the key, they could always get back to it. Theoretically, at least. It was unlikely they would send Slash on another outing. 

“You don’t know with Slash,” Axl replied. “I bet he took the money on a trip to his favourite dealer and is still flying high and right into the torture chamber.”

Izzy shrugged. As long as Slash remembered what had been in the safe, he gave a damn about how much time he spent in the basement cells. “I guess we’ll learn more tomorrow.”

They should learn a lot earlier. It wasn’t even an hour later when Slash sauntered into the day room as if nothing had happened at all. 

“Fuck, why aren’t you drooling all over the pillows in the torture chamber, huh?” Axl snapped. “If it had been me, I would spend at least a week in La-la-land. Talk about double standards.”

Slash fetched a chair and joined them, unable to keep the grin off his face. 

“They have forgiven me,” he said. “Because I realized the errors of my ways and came back all on my own. Which was a sign of accepting responsibility and owning up for my mistakes.”

Axl snorted. 

“So, they won’t make an issue out of it At least not as long as my urine sample is going to come back clean.”

“And?” Axl asked. “Will it?”

Slash glared. 

“Spare me the bullshit,” Izzy hissed. “Did you get into the safe?”

“Yep, I did.” Slash wiped hair out of his face. “It was so easy, I just went into the bank, said I needed a look into my safe and they let me in. No questions, nothing.”

“And what was in there?” Axl asked. “No money I guess or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Papers,” Slash said. 

”And?” Izzy prompted. 

Slash shrugged. “No idea. Columns of figures and names. Must be about a hundred pages or so. Didn’t make any sense to me.”

“Awesome.” Izzy slumped. “So, we’re just where we were before.”

“I only had a quick glance through them,” Slash said. “We can study them in detail tomorrow.”

“You brought them here?” Izzy sat up. “I told you not to…”

“Yes, yes.” Slash waved his hand. “But as I said I couldn’t figure this shit out. And I couldn’t sit down there and think about it, either could I? And I still had to come back and I didn’t have money for a cab and had to hitchhike. Which is why it took me so long, by the way. Tell somebody you're trying to catch a ride to a loony bin and they drive off faster than you can say 'boo'. I had to give them a destination miles off and walk the rest of the way. But, anyway, I brought this shit and you can see for yourselves. Maybe one of you can make head or tail out of it.”

“Has anybody seen them?” Izzy asked, alarmed. “One of the doctors? Which one?”

“Nobody.” Slash grinned. “I wrapped them into a plastic bag and threw them over the wall before I rang at the door. They are outside. About where Duff’s Christmas tree is, so should have landed in our section of the garden. That thing is like a lighthouse. All we have to do is go out tomorrow and pick it up.”

Duff put his chin back onto Izzy’s shoulder. “Merry Christmas,” he whispered. “And a happy New Year.”


	11. Demon Slaying

It was difficult to find a quiet place to study the documents in peace, but eventually they did the forbidden thing and closed the door to Izzy’s and Axl’s room until there was only a foot-wide gap. Enough to not be seen, not so much that it became overly suspicious. It was only half an hour until lunch and the staff had hopefully better things to do than insisting on the house rules. 

Slash spread the papers over Axl’s bed, and frowned at the columns of names and figures. 

“Does this make any sense to anybody?” he asked. Nervously he looked towards the door and listened for footsteps, but just as Izzy had predicted, nobody cared for them. “First, I thought there was a number to each name, but the numbers change when the names are repeated, see?”

Axl pulled a handful of sheets over to himself. “It would have been easier if there had just been porn. We’ll never figure out what this shit means.” He tossed the pages away. 

“You’ve got the attention span of a toddler,” Izzy said. “As if we had anything better to do than trying to work this shit out, even if it’s gonna take a decade.”

Slash shuddered. Maybe Izzy and Axl were facing decades in here, but he had still other plans with his life. He looked at Duff, who was staring absently out of the window and wondered if he knew the answer. But even if, they would never get anything but riddles out of him. 

“It’s money,” Axl said unclearly, as he was sucking at his left index finger at the same time. “Payments maybe.”

“Payments for what?” Izzy shifted through a handful of pages. “57500? Dollars or pesos?”

“Donations,” Slash said. “If this vault really belongs to this Henley that is. He was running all these church charities. He probably got donations. Or tithing or however they call it.”

“In that case he raised enough to become the pope.” Axl scowled at the sheets as if that would solve the question. “Drug money,” he said. “The guy was running a cocaine ring. Hey, Duff?”

Duff turned from the window to Axl. “Did you ever snort cocaine at this house? Where you killed this guy?”

“Where somebody died,” Izzy corrected sharply when Duff’s expression turned upset. “Where you got the key,” he added. “Were there drugs? White powder? Like sugar?”

Duff shrugged and Slash thought that somebody who was constantly as high as Duff didn’t need any additional drugs. He was one lucky bastard. 

Slash checked the list again when a name caught his eye. 

“There’s a dealer here in town whose name is Martins. He’s one of the sharks in the pond. He’s got…ugh… I don’t know how many guys running for him. Also owns a couple of night clubs.” He pointed at the entry. “He appears several times it seems.”

“And I bet he’s the only one with that name in the whole wide world,” Axl muttered. “Oh, and look here’s a Hopton. Maybe Doc Hopton is a drug dealer, too. I bet…”

“Wait,” Izzy interrupted him. “Where?”

Axl pointed onto the name. “Here and here and a couple more times later. Run of the mill names and as there’s no first name… Hey, maybe I’ll find a Rose. Then I’ll be a drug dealer, too.”

“I thought your name was Bailey,” Izzy said. 

Slash looked up. “Bailey?” he asked. He only knew Axl as Axl Rose. 

“It’s Rose,” Axl growled. 

Slash gave him a curious glance, but let the topic drop. Axl had that special look in his eyes, a mixture of anger and panic, which would lead into a full-blown tantrum if he was pushed only half an inch further. 

“When did Hopton come here?” Izzy asked. He had obviously seen the same signs of danger and wasn’t pushing the name question. “After Duff, right?”

Axl nodded. “A month or so later. I remember how they were all excited about getting such an expert into the house. One who could go anywhere he wanted, but who chose St John’s of all places. And he was all eager to get Duff as a patient, of course.” He sneered. “They all think Duff is so majorly over interesting. And? Did all his awesome, fantastic methods work on him? No. I remember when Hopton was new here. Duff spent more time in his office than anywhere else, and he wasn’t better at all. If anything, he was getting worse and worse. Each time you just looked at Duff, he thought you were one of his demons. And he was always hiding in that fucking closet and … oh, fuck, you’re right.”

Axl’s eyes burned brighter than ever, all irritation about his name forgotten, and Slash almost heard the thoughts click in his brain. Overbearing imagination or not, Axl was not stupid. 

“Hopton’s the devil,” he breathed. “Jesus Christ! And he’s trying to kill Duff because he’s on this list.”

“And now he’s leaving,” Izzy added. “As long as he was here, things were under control. He could just make sure, Duff was so off his rockers, nobody would take anything he said serious.”

“Yeah,” Slash said, “but now he’s leaving. Guess he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life here.” 

“And he’s tying up loose ends,” Izzy finished for him. “That’s why he upped the ante like this. And that’s why he became careless. I have bunked with Duff for how long? And I’ve never seen the devil in our room. Fuck, last time he was there, he even made sure I got extra sleeping pills. But when he’s gone, then they will assign another shrink to Duff and, who knows, he might finally talk about what has happened. Hopton can’t risk that. So far, he has just ensured that Duff doesn’t make any sense. Now he’s got to make sure he can’t talk at all.”

“And what better way than to make him commit suicide,” Slash added. “Or kill him in some way he can mask as suicide. Nobody will care if some mental patient jumped off a roof.”

“This doesn’t have to be about drugs,” Izzy said, coming back to the topic at hand. “Might be something completely else, money laundry, corruption, tax crimes.”

“But it’s illegal,” Slash added. “I mean, this is not a Christmas mailing list. No matter what it is, somebody would kill for it.”

“We’ll never figure this out on our own.” Izzy scratched his head. “I hate to say this, but we need to get the list to the cops.”

“Are you insane?” Axl protested. “They’ll make sure it gets lost. I bet the police president is on here, too.”

“Then make a better suggestion,” Izzy hissed, his voice a lot higher than it usually was. “If we hide this shit here, that’s about as useless as leaving it in the safe. And I can’t keep Duff away from Hopton. He’s his fucking shrink, he gets Duff alone all the time. Next time he might have success and then?”

Duff joined them on the bed, and took Izzy’s hand in his. 

“Fuck!” Izzy spat and for a moment he hid his face at Duff’s shoulder, while Duff brushed over the back of his head. Just when Slash feared that he might start crying, Izzy sat up straight again, all signs of despair wiped off, and his expression as cool and unfazed as it always was. 

“Hopton.” Slash thought about the black figure bending over Duff’s bed and shuddered. The build was quite right. Hopton was tall and haggard at least. “We’ve got to find that Halloween costume of his.”

“Maybe he takes it home for Mommy to wash and iron it,” Axl snapped. 

Slash glared at him. “And maybe he keeps it here. When I saw him that night Thomas came running within minutes.”

“Because you screamed like a baby. If you had pulled down that mask we wouldn’t be sitting here.”

“He must have taken it off and hidden it somewhere,” Slash continued, determined to not let Axl rile him up. “Somewhere not so far. Fuck, it was Hopton who was on duty that night. I know that, because Thomas wanted him to give me a shot, when I freaked out. But he said something like, he was sure I would calm down on my own. ‘cause he knew it wasn’t a hallucination.”

“Motive, opportunity…” Izzy sighed. 

“We’ve got to find the costume,” Slash insisted. If they found the costume, then they would have final proof. “Fuck, if we go to the cops and tell them about the key and the list, they still won’t believe that somebody’s after Duff. They might think we got lucky with the list, but they’ll be sure we’re all hallucinating when we tell them about the devil! And the name, that could be coincidence. Like Axl said, run of the mill names.” 

“There was this one cop,” Axl suddenly said. “In the beginning, right after they brought Duff. This guy kept interviewing him, tried to make him tell what had happened. Fucking loser. But I had the feeling, he thought there was more behind it all than just a burglary gone wrong. His name was Bradley, I think.”

“Brantley,” Duff corrected. “Detective Sergeant Jonathan Brantley. 5561 Ocean Road. 213 394 7616. I can call him at home if I like that better. Anytime. Even at night.” Duff reached into his pocket and fished out a couple of coins. “And these go into the telephone next to the front desk, and I should keep them with me all the time in case I’d like to talk to him.”

“Wow,” Axl said. “You still know his phone number? And you still have the money in your pocket?”

“I should keep it with me all the time,” Duff repeated, as if, yes, obviously he still had the money in his pocket two years later. He had been told so, after all. 

“You know, Duff, sometimes…;” Izzy shook his head. “So, question is: do we call this Brantley 55 whatever Ocean Road?”

“What if he’s in on it?” Slash asked nervously. He was one with Axl on this. He didn’t trust cops, never had, never would.

“They already have Hopton in here,” Izzy replied. “Why send a cop and even raise the suspicion that things were not as they seemed to be? Duff broke into the house, he was shot, he was declared insane and sent here. Case solved. No loose ends. A cop asking additional questions wouldn’t serve the purpose. A psychiatrist, now that’s something else.”

“So, we do call him?” Axl asked. He didn’t look like he really wanted to. 

Izzy sighed again. “Give me something to write. What was the number, Duff?” 

Axl handed him pen and paper and Izzy scribbled the phone number down. 

Slash, Duff and Axl waited while Izzy padded down the corridor to the payphone and made the call. 

“And?” Slash asked. 

“I left a message with his wife,” Izzy replied. “I should have thought that he might be working, but somehow you lose every grasp about how normal life works when you’re in here long enough. I said it was an emergency and gave her Duff’s name.”

“Think he’ll call back?” Slash asked. 

Izzy shrugged. “Doesn’t leave the best impression when you give St. John’s Institution for the Mentally Impaired as address, does it? Especially when you then keep saying ‘just Duff, no family name’.”

Axl snickered. “She probably thought it was a prank call.”

“At least he’s still alive and still living at the same address. I guess all we can do now is wait.”

“Or search for the costume,” Slash said. He wasn’t happy with having nothing to present except a sheet full of figures. 

“And where should we start?” Axl asked. 

“In his office, of course.” Slash grinned. “I thought you had the keys.”

Axl blanched. 

“Good idea,” Izzy said. 

“Yeah, right,” Axl snapped. “For you. If I get caught at that I can look forward to a life in the basement.”

Izzy shrugged. “Then give me the keys. You don’t have to go. If we get caught, I’ll take all the blame.”

“As if I would.” Axl blew a strand of hair out of his face. “They’re my keys. So why should you have all the fun, huh?”

“Your decision. But I’m going tonight.”

“You and me, we’ll be deep in sweet, chemical dreams tonight,” Axl reminded him

Izzy pursed his lips. “Slash won’t.”

”So, I’ll go on my own?” Slash shivered. Why was it always him who had to take the risk?

“No. But when it’s candy-time, you’ll start some drama exactly at the moment when Axl and me have just received our pills. Make sure you’re fast enough that I can spit them out before they melt. Means we have to stay together in line, of course.” 

He gave Axl a dark stare. Getting Axl to follow instructions was a task that had driven stronger men into despair, but Izzy was tough. He had even managed to make him plant tomatoes. 

“Get one of the crazies going. Pinch him or so. When one of them starts screaming all of them will. That’s gonna give us a chance to get rid of the pills without anybody noticing.”

They wrapped the documents back into the plastic bag and hid it under Izzy’s bed. 

For the rest of the day they were all so tense, that Slash was convinced, somebody just had to notice they were up to something. He got an extra session to explain what he had been thinking when he had been running away, did his best to talk about his feelings for an hour (guilt … he felt soooo much guilt), got his allowance docked for the next two months and said internally good-bye to any cigarettes. Right now, Axl was the only one of them who was getting paid, and what had the world come to, when Axl was the one having the most stickers on his merit chart? 

+++

At two AM Slash, Izzy and Axl were piling up in a small cabinet, hiding between sheets and scrubs and cans of detergent, while Thomas drank coffee and read the newspaper in the glazed reception cubicle right next to the entrance of the ward. 

“How long are we going to wait, huh?” Axl pressed his eye against the gap before he carefully closed the door, shutting out what little bit of light had come in before. 

“Until he’s gotta take a piss,” Izzy said. “He’s pretty regular in that. Always between two and three, somehow. I know because he’s coming past our room. Back in the day, a long time ago, when I was at the prime of my youth, and still allowed to be awake at night, that was when I was able to make note of shit like that. Guess that’s when the coffee has reached critical mass.”

“You mean we’re going to sit here for over an hour?” Axl sounded exasperated. 

“How about the two of you shut up,” Slash hissed. “Or somebody’s gonna find us and then we can try and explain that we were planning a group orgy in the broom cabinet.” He tried to find a more comfortable way to sit, but whenever he stretched out his legs, he kicked either Axl or Izzy and got an angry shove in return. The sheets above him smelled of cheap washing powder and the rags around him were fusty. 

“An orgy with only three people?” Izzy asked. “And one of them being Axl? You don’t expect much from life, I’ve gotta say.”

Slash rolled his eyes, although nobody would be able to see it in the darkness. 

“Asshole,” Axl hissed. 

Izzy chuckled. “I’ll take that back. Actually, I love that ass of yours, baby. Want me to show you a good time? After all we’re roommates now and you should enjoy the full benefit of that.”

“The hell you’ll do,” Axl muttered. Slash felt him shift, away from Izzy and closer to him. “Go and fuck Duff.”

“I would, but they moved him out. Don’t worry, Axl, you’re only being shy. I’ll be gentle, promise. Do you scream in bed the way you scream … all the fucking time?”

“Would you shut the fuck up,” Slash hissed. Sometimes Izzy really was an asshole. Axl was crawling more and more into his direction. Any further and he would be sitting in his lap. He was already twitching and unable to keep still. Any more of that and he would start screaming. “Why the fuck are you doing this? I know this is an insane asylum, but I thought at least you would be kind of normal.”

There was a moment of silence. 

“You’re right,” Izzy said eventually. “Sorry. Didn’t mean it like that. Axl, I would never fuck you, even if you were the last piece of ass on the entire planet. Happy now?”

Axl snorted, but he crawled out of Slash’s lap again. 

“But you do have a nice ass,” Izzy whispered, and Slash wanted to slap him. 

“Thanks,” Axl breathed, to his surprise. “You, too.”

And then they both snorted with laughter under their breaths like stupid teenagers. Slash was ready to throttle them both. 

Eventually, even those two idiots fell quiet any waited. How long it took he couldn’t say, but suddenly there was a low wail echoing through the corridor. Slash grinned. There was one thing you could count on if you lived in a nuthouse. Somebody was always going to make trouble. He heard footsteps, probably Thomas’, hurrying down the corridor, and then a door was shut with a significant thud. 

Izzy opened the door, checked that Thomas was nowhere to be seen, and they all hurried towards the ward’s exit. Axl fidgeted with the keys and Slash suddenly realized that he had no idea which was the right one. 

“Hurry up, for fuck’s sake,” Izzy hissed when Axl jutted one key after the other into the lock.  
His hands trembled so hard that he dropped the whole bunch twice, and Slash was just about to rip it out of his hands and try himself, when one key suddenly fitted and turned and the door opened. 

They tried all three to squeeze through at the same time, but finally, when Slash as the last one closed the door carefully behind himself, they stood in the stairways, blocked from Thomas’ view by the wall. 

There was no time to let it settle how much luck they had just had. Izzy gave him a rough shove and he stumbled forward, down the staircase to the first floor where the offices went off from a long corridor. More fiddling with another locked door, until Izzy ripped the keys out of Axl’s hands and unlocked the office himself. 

Slash stood almost dazed, leaning against the wall behind him, and stared at the desk with the family photos in pretty frames, the shelves full of books the cupboards that lined the walls and his knees started to tremble. So many human fates were decided in this room, not only his own, or Izzy’s, Axl’s and Duff’s. Suddenly he saw hundreds, thousands of wide-eyed, faces looking at him, pleading to be released from this crypt. He pictured himself, how he had to look in fifty years, his hair grey, his face full of wrinkles, his eyes dead and devoid of hope. He choked. Suddenly there was not enough air in the room and he was convinced he had to puke.

“How much time do you think we have?” he heard Axl ask through the rush of blood in his ears. 

“Not enough, so get a move on,” Izzy growled. “You too, Slash. Are you high or what the fuck are you staring at?” 

Slash shook his head and willed the unease down. Izzy was right. He had all the time to freak out later, when they had been caught. Because they would be caught. And then it was good-bye to freedom for good. 

In a hurry they went through the drawers in Hopton’s desk, threw the cushions off the sofa and searched through the cupboards. 

“This one is locked,” Axl suddenly said and pulled at a drawer in one of the cabinets. “All the others are open and this one is locked? What for?”

“There’s got to be a key somewhere,” Izzy replied. “In the desk or so.” 

While Izzy and Axl went through all the drawers again, pulled paper and envelopes out, Slash opened the door to the neighbouring room. It was the side entrance to the archive, he realized, a long line of cabinets where all their fates were shelved and organized and filed for eternity

”Nothing,” Axl said after a while. “We’ve got to break into it.”

Izzy hesitated. “OK,” he said. “We have no chance to hide somebody has been in here anyway. Not with the chaos we’ve already created. Is there a paper knife or something?”

Quietly Slash closed the door to the archive behind himself and approached the lines of filing cabinets. “AA – AK” stood on the first one and slowly, without touching anything, he made his way to “He – HZ”. With trembling fingers, he flipped through the file hangers until he found his own and pulled it out. The rush of blood in his ears was back and his hands trembled. He was unable to open it and read the verdict, so instead he shoved it under his shirt. Maybe they would make it back to their rooms without somebody noticing, and maybe he would then be able to face whether they would ever let him out or condemn him to being buried alive, just like Axl. 

He shuddered. Out of an impulse he went ahead to “Re – Ru”, but he only found “Meredith Rose” and “Elizabeth Rose”. Then he suddenly remembered that Izzy had said something about Axl’s real name being Bailey and went back to “Ba - Bo”. He had no luck either. The only Bailey was called William. He pulled out the file and opened it and on the first page was a picture of Axl. 

For a moment Slash was startled. ‘William Bruce Bailey’ he read. ‘*06. Feb. 1962, Lafayette, Indiana’. He flipped through the pages, then stopped cold when he stumbled across a set of photographs.

“Slash?” 

Slash didn’t move. He couldn’t take his eyes off the photos, just stood there and stared while fingers dug into his shoulder. 

“Slash?”

He let the file sink and turned around to Izzy’s slightly worried face. 

“We’ve found the costume,” he said. “We called this cop again from Hopton’s phone and this time he was home. Yeah, well, middle of the night and all. Looks like his wife really thought it was a prank. But he does remember Duff. I gave him the gist of what we’ve found out, and he promised to be here in an hour. I’ve sent Axl down to intercept him if possible. Hopefully he manages to stay out of the way until the guy his here and we get to him before one of the docs.”

Slash closed the file and pressed it against his chest.

“What’s this?” Izzy took it out of his hands. “Axl’s?”

“Did you know?” Slash asked hoarsely. 

Izzy opened it and skimmed through the pages. “Yes. Didn’t you?”

Slash shook his head. 

Izzy sighed and put the file back into its place. Quietly he closed the drawer and leant against it. 

“Axl,” he started, slowly as if searching for words, “our Axl, I mean, the guy who drives us crazy every day …,” he broke off and shrugged. 

“Axl said it was you who killed a whole family with a chainsaw.”

Izzy shrugged. “I guess it’s his way of dealing with it. I mean, how do you deal with having killed your parents? Pretend it didn’t happen, I guess. Pretend somebody else did it, not you. Pretend your family lives, but chooses not to visit you, not care for you.”

“But…”

Izzy sighed. “Look. Axl even refuses to know his own name. He refuses to remember and I’m sure he really does not. Except from a flash here and there maybe. In some way, just like Duff, he lives in a world that is not real. Only he’s better at hiding it. You’ve seen what happened when his sister visited. I know he pretends she doesn’t care about him, but it’s not true. She has been here before. Same result. When anybody tries to confront Axl with his past, he flips. I guess they thought it was time for another attempt at reintroducing them and failed.”

“Axl killed his parents with a chainsaw,” Slash repeated, needing the words to sink in. 

“No, he didn’t. He cut their throats in their sleep. With a knife. Only afterwards he went at it with a chain saw. First the bodies, then the house. When the cops came, he was busy with the furniture. He was how old when it happened? Sixteen? Seventeen?”

“Fourteen,” Slash breathed. “He was only fourteen.”

“Fourteen, then. I don’t know all the details, but from what I heard there was a fuckload of abuse going on with his stepfather. The really heavy shit. Doc Johnson wrote a complete scientific paper just about Axl. I’ve once found a stack of prints in his office and nicked one. It doesn’t give Axl’s name of course, but I’m sure it’s him. I don’t know enough of this shit, but according to Doc J. he kind of learned to … be two different persons or so. One who was there when the bad stuff happened and one for the rest of the time. Complete dissociation. And eventually it all blew up or maybe he invented yet another person who played the role of the avenger or whatever. Suffice to say, Axl is crazy as hell and eventually it all exploded around him.”

“I thought you were the chainsaw murderer.” Slash repeated. 

Izzy laughed without mirth. “You really believed that, didn’t you?” He shrugged. “I knew Axl was telling stories about me, only I didn’t know what. Until that day in the garden, when he slipped.”

“But you didn’t …”

“Correct him? Why should I? I’m not keen on being awarded the ‘Inmate of the Month’ badge. If it makes people stay away from me, they can believe whatever they want.” Izzy snorted. “So that’s why everybody falls silent as soon as I look at them. And here I thought it was my inner menace. I guess I have to thank Axl for it, then.”

“But Duff didn’t,” Slash said. 

“Believe it? I don’t know. Maybe he does. But things are different for Duff. I think he knows whether you’re out to harm him or not. He has an instinct for that. I guess it’s what has kept him alive.”

“Then why are you here…,”

Izzy shook his head. “It’s not your business.” He said it quite friendly, but Slash knew the discussion was over. “Come on. Let’s go down. We’ve got to keep Axl from driving this cop off before somebody had the occasion to talk like a normal human being to him.”

+++

An hour later they sat in one of the meeting rooms, Izzy, Axl, Slash, Duff and Detective Jonathan Brantley. If Izzy had been worried that nobody would take them seriously, he had worried in vain. A whole bunch of cops were swarming over the hospital, searching offices and questioning the staff. 

Brantely had wanted to talk to them one after the other, but they had refused, just as they refused to say one word for as long as one of the staff was present. They had gotten their way. 

Izzy was still not sure how to play this. He couldn’t just give in and trust that things would be handled in their best interest. Nobody cared about them. Yes, now they were witnesses and for a while, would be useful. But apart from that they were still depending on what others decided for them. He wondered how many demands he would be able to push through, and what it would mean for Duff and him and the future. They should probably have a lawyer. 

Spread out on the table lay the Halloween costume, a cheap black cape, a mask with a grinning devil’s face and red horns and in addition tiny red lightbulbs, a pair of heat-proof gloves and two small, flat, metal plates. Hopton probably hadn’t meant to burn Duff with them, just scare him even more, but at least once they had gotten too hot. 

On one hand it was a relief that Duff hadn’t passed over into the realm of religious insignia, but Izzy still had to forcefully control his rage, when he thought about all the terror Duff had gone through. He was also angry at himself, and that he had lumped the devil in with all the other hallucinations. He had fallen line, hook and sinker for Hopton’s plan. So much about protecting Duff. He had done a piss poor job about it. 

“And this is what Slash found in the bank vault,” Axl said and pointed at the lists. "We think it’s drug money." 

“No, we don’t,” Izzy corrected him. “We have no idea what it is.”

Brantley skipped through the lists. “We’ll look into this.” 

Izzy wasn’t sure what to make out of him. He seemed to take their story serious; at least he had listened to them, had tried to keep them from talking all at the same time, had asked additional questions and had never treated them like a bunch of lunatics. Not even Axl. Although he had no idea how to get information out of Duff, which was forgivable, as it took a lot of training and experience. 

He still didn’t trust cops and here he was sitting, handing all their lives over to one, just because he had happened to give Duff a handful of coins and his private phone number. 

“And when will we know about the outcome of your looking into this? And what’s with Hopton until then? And Duff?” Izzy tried to sound cool and calm, but he couldn’t keep the edge out of his voice. At least his hands weren’t trembling. 

“He’s really dead?” Duff asked suddenly. So far, he had just been sitting there, not saying a single word, but now he reached out and carefully touched the seam of the cape. “He looks dead to me.”

“No, unfortunately not.” Axl said and Duff quickly pulled his hand back. “But he’d deserve to be, that asshole. I mean, if there’s any type of justice in this world, then…”

Izzy briefly closed his eyes. “Axl,” he said tiredly, “just shut up.” 

He turned to Duff who made another attempt at pushing with one finger against the cape, clearly afraid that it might come alive. “He won’t be back, OK? You’ll never see him again.”

Duff nodded, but he shifted on his chair until his knee bumped against Izzy’s leg. 

“So, what about Duff now?” Izzy repeated. “He can’t stay here. Nobody knows how many of Hopton’s cronies are part of the staff. And I give a fuck if I sound paranoid, you try being locked up with somebody who’s not only out to kill you, but who can lock you up and tie you up and shoot you up at a whim with whatever kind of drug he wants to.”

“I’m not saying you’re paranoid,” Brantley replied. “I agree that for now we should find another place for Duff, maybe even for all of you. You’re after all witnesses. I just have to make a couple of calls.”

“Oh, fuck,” Axl groaned, running his nails over his naked arm until it was covered in white lines. “Not again.” He let his head drop onto the table and buried his face in his arms. “Where to now?” he groaned. Then he looked up. “At least make sure it’s got TVs in every room, OK? And a cook who deserves that name. And no, really, no gardening therapy. And if you’re already at it anyway, hot showers would be nice.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Duff said lightly. “I’ll stay with Izzy. And anyway, there’s pizza for dinner.”

Izzy fixed Brantley with the darkest stare he was capable of. “You’re not going to separate us,” he said quietly. 

Finding four beds in one facility was almost impossible, especially as for him and Axl the place would have to come up with the necessary security arrangements. Brantley didn’t know that yet, but one of the first things he would do was having a look at all their files. Well, maybe except the one Slash still kept under his shirt. 

“Don’t get me wrong, but my confidence in public authorities is for some reason a little unsettled. It might sound insane, but I have more trust in Axl than in the whole judiciary of the state of California.”

“Hey!” Axl yelled, but then he smiled, liking the idea of being trusted at all. 

Izzy looked at him almost fondly. Somehow, Axl had grown on him during the last weeks. He definitely had held his own in this whole disaster. 

Brantley sighed. “You’re making this difficult for me.”

Izzy smiled. “We’ll all go together or not at all. And without our statements you won’t really have a case, will you? Those names? Could be anybody. But tie it to Duff and Hopton trying to kill him, and you’ll get somewhere.”

He turned around when Duff tucked gently at his sleeve. 

“What about the pizza?” 

“Right,” Izzy added. “Real pizza, not the ‘slosh the leftovers of the whole week onto a piece of dough’ version you get here.”

“Pizza I can arrange,” Brantley said. “Apart from that all I can do right now is have an officer stay here for your protection.” 

Izzy shrugged. If he was honest, he didn’t think any of them were in acute danger, but he couldn’t keep the unease out of his stomach. He wanted to be away from St. John’s, now, the farther the better. 

“You will also have to come to the police station for interviews, and we might come up with a lot more questions. Also about the old case, and Duff’s roll in it.” 

Izzy shrugged again. It was a careful hint that Duff would have the label of ‘whore’ stamped onto his forehead.

“Can I ask you something?” Slash asked. He had been mostly quiet, only talking when he was asked a direct question. “Why didn’t you believe in the burglary story? Everybody else did.”

Brantley sighed. “It’s a bit embarrassing.” He looked over to Duff, who was now leaning against Izzy, eyes closed, Izzy’s arm around his shoulder. “When I first had a chance to talk to Duff, after he came out of surgery… He wouldn’t answer my questions.”

“No joke,” Axl muttered. 

“I didn’t know then that it was a general problem. However, he couldn’t sit up on his own, so I helped him. And when I touched him, he tried to jerk me off. Like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like it was just what was expected of him, no matter that he was barely able to keep his eyes open. That’s when I got the feeling that things were not lining up.”

“OK,” Izzy said, trying not to think too much about Duff’s past. He had to focus on their future and that was difficult enough. “That’s all then?”

They were released and, as it was early morning already, returned to the day room. 

“I need breakfast,” Axl said. “I’m hungry as fuck. Being clearheaded during night makes hungry.”

“In an hour,” Slash said. He still looked shaken to Izzy. 

“Did you have the time to read your file yet?”

Slash looked up and Izzy cast him a smile. “Hurry up, if you really want to know. They’ll find it soon enough.”

“What about you?” Slash asked. “You could have taken yours, too. Why didn’t you?”

Izzy shrugged. “Because it doesn’t matter. Knowing what they write about me doesn’t change anything.”

“I did read it,” Slash said. “I can go home in two weeks.”


	12. Mouse

Izzy stopped the car and got out. With trembling fingers, he lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, forcing the panic down which had seized him out of the blue. It happened now and then and most of the time his reaction was to pack up and leave. 

He had tried living in San Francisco first, then Chicago, Boston and New York, never staying anywhere longer than for a couple of months. At first, he had considered it a precaution for as long as their story still made it into the newspapers. But soon enough the emphasis was only on Henley and his money laundry, and still Izzy kept moving each time the faces around him started to feel familiar. 

He had never fully understood how Henley had been doing it, only that he owned a whole conglomerate on “Christian” businesses, among those a line of clothes shops and a restaurant chain, and that he had been doing it big style for a very long time. Hopton had been only peripherally involved. As an old friend, going back to college days, he had provided Henley with prescription drugs, and had cashed in royally for his services - and had received an invitation to a private little party, just a few friends, a couple of boys and girls and lots of cocaine. 

Duff’s role had never been clarified to full satisfaction. He hadn’t belonged to the callboy ring that had provided entertainment on that day, so why and how he had gotten involved nobody could say. Even after the trial and the press attention, nobody stood up and claimed to know him. His past remained a mystery. 

He had just been there and Henley had taken him up to his bedroom. Somewhere during Duff’s services, he had dropped dead. Apparently too much cocaine and excitement were not healthy for a weak heart. 

Duff had been sitting next to the body for hours, and eventually the other guests had come looking for their host. And had panicked. In a haste the house had been cleaned of all incriminating evidence, but none of them had wanted to explain how it had been possible that Henley had died in the middle of a party, without anybody noticing. A party for which all the regular staff had been given the day off. 

All of a sudden, Duff had turned into a problem. Sending him away had not looked like a good idea. Nobody had known where he was coming from or what he would do if just let go. Threatening, bribing, there was no way to ensure that Duff would keep his mouth shut. Especially as he wouldn’t talk, just sit there and look like an orphan in a refugee camp. 

They had told him to wait in the office and discussed how to get rid of him. Of course, they were all one that nobody had planned to kill him. But if anything, Duff had an amazing sense of survival. Somehow, he had realized that it was time to go. He had broken the window, climbed down from the balcony and had so set off the alarm. 

And then things had gone very fast. Somebody had shot, but there had already been sirens howling in the street and prevented them from finishing the job. Duff had been found in the garden, with a bullet in his leg and another one in his back, bleeding out on the well-manicured lawn. 

Things had been hushed up afterwards. Too many people in influential positions had been involved, and it had all been sold to the press as a couple of friends staying a night over and getting involved in a burglary that went tragically wrong. 

Izzy took another drag. His gaze swept over the plains, the wide, endless sea of dust and grass and as always it helped him calm down. He still couldn’t take it for granted, the view to the horizon, the ability to go into whatever direction he wanted without anything blocking his way. 

Not being able to stay anywhere for longer than a couple of months was a small price compared to that. Also, that he couldn’t stand the noise and bustling of the cities anymore. Another thing that had taken him a long time to realize, that too many people made him paranoid. He kept looking for familiar faces, and the fear to be busted while buying groceries in the supermarket drove him forward and farther and farther away from the populated areas. 

Izzy snitched the stump of his cigarette onto the ground and extinguished it with the heel of his boot before he got back into the car. Duff would be waiting for his M&Ms. Sometimes Izzy took him into town for shopping, but not too often. Duff drew attention, as he would always say something crazy to somebody who happened to be there, and attention was the last thing they needed.

A couple of miles outside town, Izzy had rented a rusty caravan. It stood on a piece of dusty wasteland, but it had plumbing and electricity and their landlord didn’t care who they were or what they were doing. Suddenly he felt the urge to be back, a frenzy that was totally unreasonable because Duff never left when told to wait for him. He would sit inside or on the doorstep and do something utterly senseless and repetitive, but he wouldn’t cause any trouble. And he had Mouse to take care of him. 

He drove on and it took him another twenty minutes until he could make out the caravan as a small spot. Izzy immediately noticed that something was wrong. There was a car, waiting at a good distance away from the caravan, a man leaning against the hood.

Izzy cursed. They hadn’t been here for long, only two months, but Duff had already managed to get into the newspaper by being the 1000th customer of a newly opened burger joint. He was awarded a baseball cap and a t-shirt and as much junk food as he could eat; and unfortunately, also a photo for the local newspaper. 

He slowed down, but didn’t stop completely. The panic was back, but he couldn’t allow himself to indulge it. He couldn’t just leave either for whoever was waiting for him would have already spotted the car. And then there was of course Duff in the caravan. 

Hastily he knocked another cigarette out of the package and lit it while holding the wheel with his elbows. The sun was shining into his eyes and the car and their visitor blurred in the heat while he approached them. He felt for the gun under his seat, not even sure he would be able to use it in case it would be necessary. His hands were trembling far too badly for a decent shot. It was a fucking nuisance, but the tremors were something he couldn’t really get rid of. Sometimes his hands were steady for weeks on an end, and then they were suddenly shaking so badly, he couldn’t even pour himself a cup of coffee. 

Eventually he stopped right behind the car and got out. 

“Cigarette?” he asked, forcing his voice to be calm. 

“No thanks,” Slash said. “I quit smoking.”

“Really?”

Slash nodded “That dog of yours is rabid,” 

“She’s only doing her job.”

“If I had a gun, I would have shot it.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” Izzy took a deep drag. “Duff would be upset.”

He looked to where Duff was sitting on the step of the caravan, throwing pebbles into an empty bucket. He had practiced for days, and by now his aim was remarkable. Mouse was sitting next to him, not moving even now that Izzy was back. It was the German Shepherd’s job to have an eye on Duff whenever he had to leave him alone, and she fulfilled her duty with marvellous attention to detail. 

“Did she bite you?”

Slash showed him a set of neat holes in his left arm. 

“Good dog,” Izzy said with a satisfied nod. “How did you find us?” 

“Friend of mine was born here. A couple of months ago he moved back to take over his Dad’s diner. Did a shitload of renovation and all that and opened it new. He was awfully proud about it and sent me a newspaper snippet about his 1000th customer. Trust Duff to answer ‘How are you feeling’ with ‘like a cat with two tails but only one ear.’”

“Yeah, right? I bet they are still trying to figure that one out.” 

“Probably.” Slash looked over the plains, then back at Izzy and eyed him curiously. “Want to know what I’m still trying to figure out?”

“If you care to share?”

“Dreads, Izzy? Really?”

Izzy shrugged. “I tried to change my look as much as possible. It was either that or cutting everything short.”

“So you’re also responsible for Duff’s disastrous haircut?”

Izzy laughed softly. “He wouldn’t keep still. It’s also the reason why he is still blond. I had this awesome idea to dye him dark, but it was a no go. He must have had some traumatic experiences at a barber’s shop during a former life. The disguise doesn’t seem to work, if you recognized us right away.” 

“It does work. As I said, somebody sent me the snippet and I still had to look twice. If it had been just in some newspaper, I’d have glossed right over it.”

That was reassuring at least. Izzy didn’t feel like making another attempt at dyeing Duff’s hair. 

“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” Slash stuffed his hands into his pocket.

Izzy snitched the cigarette away. “Not really. Come on in.”

“Hi, Slash,” Duff said without interrupting his pebble-flicking for a second. “It’s inside.”

“What is inside.” Slash approached Duff, then made a carefully retreat when Mouse rose to her full height. 

“Just go inside,” Izzy said. “It’s on the table.”

Slash went into the caravan, Mouse on his heels. Probably to check that he was behaving. She could be a bit overprotective at times.

He sat down next to Duff, and Duff wrapped both arms around his neck and kissed him like he had been waiting to do just that for at least a week. Izzy held the cigarette out of the way to not accidentally set fire to Duff’s clothes. His hands trembled a little less when they were done, and he sucked again on his cigarette to calm them down further. 

“Slash was playing with Mouse,” Duff said, leant against his side and put his head down onto his shoulder. Then he straightened again, moved behind him, and propped his long legs up left and right of Izzy’s thighs. Duff’s arms came around him once more, and Izzy just leant back against his chest. “I think they like each other.”

“I bet.” Izzy took one of the pebbles and aimed at the bucket. It was quite far away and it took him three attempts until he hit. He blamed it on the fact that Duff was not only wrapped almost completely around him, but had also started to rub soothing circles over his belly. Under his shirt. Because soothing rubs always required naked skin. 

Being suddenly allowed to initiate whatever type of body contact he wanted, had been a huge relief for Duff. Old habits died a little hard and so Izzy kept him to a reasonable amount of caution in public, but at home, Duff’s affectionate side came alive at full force. He was a lot calmer since then, hardly any demon episodes, no sudden bouts of fear, no constant worrying about useless shit. In fact, Izzy had to admit, that suddenly of the two of them, he was the one who was having the most issues with anxiety. 

Izzy turned around when Slash appeared in the doorway. 

“A top hat?”

“I told you I’d find it,” Duff said. He looked up to him without letting go of Izzy, a radiant smile on his face. “I like the little belt.”

“Dude, I …,” Slash scratched his head. Then he sighed and put in onto his head. It looked less ridiculous than Izzy had expected. “Where’s it coming from?”

Izzy shrugged. “Duff likes to stroll through the prairie. With Mouse,” he quickly added when Slash gave him a reproachful look. He trusted Mouse, but even without her, Duff wasn’t his prisoner. If he wanted to roam the grassland, then that’s what he should be allowed to do. Only when he was out himself, did Izzy ask Duff to stay at home. So far it had worked that way. 

“ He came back, last week and Mouse was carrying it in her muzzle. Duff ‘found it’, but he won’t tell me where. Anyway, that’s why I knew you would be coming.”

“Are you happy you’ve got it back?” Duff asked. 

“Yeah,” Slash said, looking rather confused to Izzy. But he kept the hat on. 

“How’s Axl doing?” Izzy asked. 

Slash shrugged. “I don’t know.”

He fetched the bucket, turned it around and sat down on it. Duff protested, but he succumbed quickly when Izzy handed the bag of M&Ms over. It was a bit complicated to open it, because Duff still refused to let go of their entwined position, but eventually he managed. 

“He was angry when you were gone the next morning. With his keys. For my last two weeks I didn’t hear anything else except that you had stolen his keys. And that you should have taken him along.”

“I couldn’t wait,” Izzy said. “No matter what Brantley said. It was now or never. Before they found time to exchange the locks.”

“But I still don’t get how you escaped. The key to the main door was missing.”

“The archive,” Izzy replied. “When I came to get you, I noticed that there weren’t bars on the window. Must be the only one in the whole house. It was only first floor, so it was worth a try. I broke an ankle and almost my back when Duff fell onto me, but apart from that we made it down fine.”

“So that’s why you’re limping?” Slash pushed the top hat back a little. 

“You noticed?” It still hurt now and then, but all in all he managed well enough. He hadn’t thought the limp was even notable. 

“It’s not that obvious. But I know you and, yeah, you’re moving a bit differently. How did you manage the gate?”

“Parking area,” Izzy said. “Apparently Duff knows how to hotwire cars.”

“No!” Slash exclaimed.

“Yep. I had planned to wing it somehow, but Duff just walked straight towards Doc Johnson’s car, picked the lock with a piece of wire he just happened to have in his pocket, and started the fucker. Oh, and Doc Johnson is really a moron. He not only lets his keys lie around, he also leaves the key card for the gate in the glove box.”

“No!” Slash exclaimed. “That’s …”

“Yep,” Izzy confirmed. “More luck than one person should have. So, we just drove out. Oh, and Duff also knows how to drive. Thank God, because my ankle was really hurting. Kid drives like a maniac.”

He reached backwards and petted Duff’s head. Duff had now included Mouse into their cuddle pile, the dog rolling around in the dirt, offering her belly and leaving her tongue hang out. 

If Izzy was honest, he didn’t believe in luck. Duff had known which car to pick. He had walked past half a dozen of them, dragging Izzy along as he went, and straight towards the one that would get them past the gate. 

“So how is Axl doing?” Izzy asked again. He missed him sometimes, if he was honest. Whatever Axl was, he was unique in his own crazy way. 

“I tried to visit.” Slash sounded guilty. “But he refused to see me. I tried a few times, and then … I stopped. If I’m honest, I was almost glad. I don’t want to see that place ever again, not even as a visitor. It gives me the creeps. But I keep thinking … should I keep trying? I mean, without Axl… He was a huge part of all this. Feels like I’m abandoning him.” 

Izzy shrugged. “I don’t do guilt,” he said. “Leads nowhere.” 

Maybe this was even easier on Axl. He was the master of creating alternative realities, maybe he managed to suppress that he had ever known them. 

It must have been a blow, losing all of them within two weeks. For a few months, there had been something like comradeship between them, something that hadn’t been there before Slash had joined the gang. He wouldn’t say they had been friends, but for a short while they had belonged together like family. Like brothers, squabbling, bickering, annoying each other. And sticking together when it was necessary. Sometimes Izzy wondered if he should have taken Axl along, but as it was, he could barely handle himself. Axl, volatile as an unquiet volcano, had been too much of a liability. 

Was it fair? No. But fact was: they were all out, doing their shit, living their lives, and Axl was alone and locked up the way he had always been. 

“Are you going to stay here?” Slash asked, obviously not keen on talking any more about Axl. 

“Nope.”

“Thank God. I was fearing you had gone insane for good. This place is desolate, Izzy. You could be anywhere and this is what you chose?”

Izzy shrugged. He liked the vastness, if he was honest. 

“What are you going to do?”

Izzy took another drag and thought about it. The worst about St. John’s had been the dull routine they had been forced to follow. Having each step predetermined, knowing exactly what they would do when and where for the duration of the next ten years. 

“Move on,” he said eventually. 

“Where to?”

“Alaska? North Carolina? Chile? I have no idea. Why, care to join us?”

“Would you mind?” 

Izzy shrugged. He wasn’t so sure, but Duff tightened his arms around him, and he knew that Duff would like the idea. It might also be helpful. It was easier for Slash to sign a lease, get a phoneline, apply for all the things that needed applying if one thought about staying for longer in one and the same place. 

“There’ll be dogs,” Duff said. “For Mouse. To play with, you know. So she won’t be an only dog.”

“Dogs?” Izzy reached backwards again to tousle his hair. 

Duff nodded. “Lots of them. They have this really thick fur, you know.” He smiled. “And I get to have a puppy.”

“We already got Mouse.”

Duff frowned. “But we need lots of dogs. For the sled. To pull it. You can’t have only Mouse for that.”

Izzy raised an eyebrow at Slash. “Still want to come?” 

Slash looked positively horrified. “Do we really have to go to Alaska?” he asked back. “Couldn’t we at least try for Mexico?”

“We could,” Izzy replied. “Pack the car, drive south, eat enchiladas and drink tequila.”

“I don’t drink anymore,” Slash said. “I gave it up.”

Izzy shook his head in mild despair, but if he was honest, he wasn't drinking anymore either. He had tried once and drank himself into oblivion. It had been after a few weeks, when the anxiety had become more than he thought he could handle. Duff had countered with the worst demon episode Izzy had ever witnessed live, and so he had given it up afterwards. Trust Duff to keep him sober.

“Find a place to stay, near the beach maybe," he continued. "And then, when we’ve done all that, where do you think we will end?”

Slash sighed. “Can I at least buy warmer clothes before we leave?”

“Sure.” He would need warmer clothes, too. At least it wasn’t autumn yet. A bit late in the year maybe, for a move to Alaska, but they wouldn’t get stuck in snow right away.

“So, will I get a puppy?” Duff asked. 

“Yeah, Duff,” Izzy replied. “You will get a puppy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story was not sponsered by M&M. Although it really should be. 
> 
> And now I wasn't to write a sequel where they are living in Alaska.


End file.
